Form

[Thorb]

Hello,

I'm trying to make a form like those you usually encounter at travel agencies sites and such.

I need a system that will automatically transfer the customer to the PayPal payment page after filling out the online form and pressing continue. IMPORTANT: The information from the form should not be sent to me until the payment is completed.
After this is done the customer should be automatically transferred from the PayPal page to a thank you page.

I hope Blue Voda can provide such a system.

I don't know how to do this.

Can anyone please help me?

Regards, Thor.

[navaldesign]

Re: Form

You can not have the info AFTER payment, simply because once the user is redirected to PayPAl, no info is still available, UNLESS you store this info somewhere (a database) and you embedd a script in the Thank you page, so when the user gets back to your site, the script automatically retrieve his details from the database and emails them to you.

[Thorb]

Re: Form

Thank you Naval, but I've to say WOW! and to admit that this is as complicated to me as Greek is. It's like... I in the same time understand and have no idea what are you talking about, because unfortunatelly my computer skills aren't near to yours.

Can you please give me some "direct" tips on how I can set up such site and where to start actually, or shall I say: How in fact to do all this things you mentioned.

Please - I'm going nowhere with this without your help.

Regards Thor.

[navaldesign]

Re: Form

Hi Thor,

i'm afraid this is quite complicated to explain within the limits of the forum member assistance. It requires quite some php scripting. I can provide you with some guidelines, but the actual scripting is a bit complicated. Here is what needs to be done:

When a customer selects a service or product, he is taken to a confirmation page. So the Add to Cart or Buy Now or Submit buttons are NOT the standard PayPal ones, but are simply forms that take the customer to this confirmation page. Here, a script embedded in the page, stores all the info in the database, together with a automatically assigned Order number. A self created (by the script, based on the info submitted) PayPal button is also displayed here. When the customer clicks on it, he is taken to PAyPal. He pays, and he is redirected back to your site, in a Thank you page. At this point, you must have enabled PDT and IPN in your PayPal account. Having them enabled, PayPal passes over to your Thank you page, a "key". Now, in this Thank you page, you need to embedd a script that will "read" this key sent by PayPal, and will be accordingly be able to open a slot with PayPal's server, to retrieve from them the payment details, among which, the Order nr. After it has retrieved this number (as well as other details like amount, currency, email address of the customer, his country and more) it will look into the database to find all the details submitted by the customer in the first place, and it will send you an email with all those details.

This is the same method used by all shopping carts (as well as my own cart script). However, as you understand, this requires a lot of scripting and also in depth validation of the data, error checking, auxiliary pages (to let user know about possible mistakes or errors in the comunication with PayPal).

I do such works on a pro basis and i can asure you that if you don't have php coding experience, it will be hard (if not impossible) to do it your self.