1 responses to “How can I verify an online credit card payment then unlock content for a user for an upcoming website?”

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  eskwayrd January 17th, 2009 at 02:46

  JOESPH

  If you’re trying to clear transactions yourself, rather than using an Internet payment service, the hard part will be to establish a merchant account with a bank that allows for payments sourced from the Internet.

  If you have the payment side of things sorted, then each completed transaction will provide a completion code. You can use that code, along with a secret that you have previously generated for your server to calculate the code to email to your user. Typically, this is done with a hash, like MD5, SHA-1, or SHA-256.

  You store the hash in a local database of some kind that associates the hash with the content the user has ‘purchased’, usually by storing the filename.

  E-mail the hash to the user with some credentials to authenticate them later (I’ll assume you know how to authenticate users).

  When they login, at some point you provide a form where they can enter the code you sent to them. If the code matches the one you have in the local database, you then initiate a download of the data.

  This whole process is made a lot more straightforward with a web application development framework that takes care of handling sessions, but you can certainly write your own from scratch.