I have a web service at which users can buy reports made on the fly using PayPals Express checkout process. I want to make sure that no matter how the user returns to the site (through paypals callback or by himself) he could download the report he payed for. For that I need to keep the report ID he has bought somewhere. Where and how would it be best to do that? (Cookies? Sessions Parameters?)
I am using ASP .Net C#.
Thanks,
Wess
Do the users have logins that are managed by you in your database? If so and you want the user to be able to return at any time to your page and download the report, then you'll need to use a PayPal callback to store in your database what report ID the user has purchased.
If you don't manage your users then I'm not sure how this can be accomplished because cookies are limited (and can be disabled by users) and sessions expire.
Related
I am working on a beta-stage writing tool SaaS that is built with NextJS, React, and Django REST. As I’m gaining some user base, I am starting to research on introducing a premium plan to the mix using Stripe.
As most other SaaSs, I will have a subscription-based premium plan which grants access to premium-only features. However, even after days of research, I am still lost how this is commonly implemented in Django/Backend. Here is what I’ve thought of so far, but again, I am not sure if it’s the best/common way to accomplish this.
User model has a ‘premium’ field which is either True or False
Whenever user clicks on a premium-only API call, Django will check if user is premium or not to decide whether to make the actual API call. I currently have a '/user/me/' route which returns basic user information as API GET call.
Upon successful stripe payment, stripe redirects user to the success_url. Then, somehow I will detect when user lands on success_url and then set that user’s premium field to True.
I know this is not the ideal way, because I already see lots of issues/hurdles:
How will I set ‘premium’ field back to False after user’s payment stops
How can I ‘detect’ stripe’s payment to set user’s premium field
Is this feature supposed to be implemented with Stripe customer objects instead? I would appreciate any guidance on where I should be looking for solutions.
If you use subscription on Checkout Session (low code solution), you can add additional key-value pair data such as premium: true in metadata and subscription_data.metadata fields when creating a subscription.
Once the payment is completed, those metadata will appear in checkout.session.completed and customer.subscription.updated webhook events, which you can then set the user as premium in your own database.
A customer object in Stripe can have multiple subscriptions, so this feature will be implemented on subscription object instead.
I made a Django online-store site and I need to include paypal checkout system for the cart, but solutions I found online either just for one item only(Buy Now buttons) or something like django-paypal-cart, which is not well-documented and I can't figure out how to make it to the checkout.
Please, give me some hint, maybe good article about how to make your cart items go to the checkout, anything will be highly appreciated, I don't know what else to google now
There are numerous options for tying PayPal into your website or app. Depending on exactly what you're doing or how good you are with web service API's you may choose one or another.
If you want to keep things simple, you can stick with Payments Standard. This is basically what you're referring to about the one item only buy now button, but you can use the cart upload command method to build a form that includes multiple items and pass it all over to PayPal at once.
If you prefer web service API's I'd recommend using Express Checkout. This consists of SetExpressCheckout, GetExpressCheckoutDetails, and DoExpressCheckoutPayment. Read through that general EC documentation to get familiar with the calls and how it all flows.
Another thing I would highly recommend utilizing is Instant Payment Notification (IPN). This is a feature where PayPal will POST transaction data to a listener script that you have sitting on your server any time a transaction occurs on your PayPal account. This includes payments, refunds, disputes, cleared payments that were pending, etc. This allows you to automate tasks like updating your database, sending out custom email notifications, hitting 3rd party web services, etc. and it happens in real-time, so it's very powerful.
I am trying to find out how active are the users of my web page after registration, based on what was the source/landing page of their first visit. I would rather not try to track users myself - I am already employing Google Analytics on my web page and I know it uses the __utma cookie to tell one user from another. I can see summarized landing pages/sources in my Analytics reports but would need to have this data per specific user in the time of their sign up.
Essentially, when the user signs up with my web page I would like to retrieve their landing page and source from Google Analytics and store it in my application's database along with user's name, password, activity etc. This way I could check later, for example whether users who came from Google were more prone to buying premium service that those who came from Facebook etc.
I checked the Google Analytics API reference but it doesn't seem to provide getters for this specific data. I've been looking in up in Google and in Stack Overflow for a while.
This seems like a pretty useful functionality, which many websites should need. What am I missing? Maybe I should seek for a solution that doesn't involve GA? Or switch to a different analytics? Or track user's landing pages with cookies myself?
I'm building a simple Django application for a client which will allow for users to register paid accounts to gain access certain parts of the site; however, I've never handled payment processing beyond a few simple Paypal buttons.
My question is, how would I securely handle and verify payments in this situation?
You might be able to use some of the payment code from Satchmo:
http://www.satchmoproject.com/docs/dev/payment.html
i would like to know a good software engineering way to store user preferences in a web app.
to clarify further, my app has commands that the user can choose, so
i added a button that when some commands are selected, these commands are saved as favorites somewhere on the client's machine, that way if user X logs in at anytime he can check his favorite commands and load them automatically..
how to save these commands and where? and taking into consideration that several users using the same computer should not have access to each's favorites, so i want the favorite to be saved based on userID. where and how to save them? cookies? xml? and using php or javascript is better?
thx a lot for your help:)
The best way to do this is have them log in whenever accessing your site. Then you store all of the preferences on your server and deliver them down through your UI to their browser. This will mean that it doesn't matter what browser/device they happen to be using, their settings will follow them.
I'm not sure I like the idea of modifying someone's "favorites" in their browser. I'm not sure I'd stick with a site that wanted that level of control over my browser.
Now, if you are just talking about having a page on your site that had a list of "favorites", then that's okay. Just keep it server side.
Most typical would be to store them in a database of some sort on the server side, easily accessable by the UserID. Keep in mind 'preferences' are different from 'state'. State variables are usually stored via whatever cookie mechanism you are using.
What is your web app using to hold the data on the back-end? Most likely, that is where you will want to store user preferences. Since you will already be accessing that back-end (a database, perhaps?) to authenticate the user for login, retrieving that user's preferences is a simple step from there.
The real story here is that we need more details. Are you storing authentication information in a database, or something else? How are your user sessions stored (i.e., when a user logs in, how does your web app tell that his browser is logged in on subsequent requests)? Your question seems to state this, but to clarify, are these PHP pages containing some amount of Javascript?
Depends on your requirements. You will need to choose either to store user preferences in your database, provided your users authenticate, this is probably preferred solution. But if it meets your requirements you can save user preferences in a cookie.
Here is are javascript functions and jquery plugin with examples on how to work with cookies.