Prepaid Time System

[WargRider]

Hello everyone, so I am going to be developing a website for a friend of mine. He owns this business that allows people to come to his store, pay 20 dollars and play some games. He wants on his website, a paying system, where users can pay 15$ instead of $20, and when they come to his store, he can see they prepaid. I had some ideas on how to do this, but my questions are:

1) Can paypal handle this kind of system, where my website can read if they paid the money and add their name to an MySQL database?

2) If not, then how would I go about doing this in PHP, ASP... etc...

I would gladly appreciate any help. Thank You!

This is like a voucher / booking system. Should be plenty of ready made scripts that you could modify. Paypal can take money for a transaction - sure - but be aware that the charge for this - so your friend will not get the full $15.

The rationale behind this I take it is less admin / money changing. Is an effective loss of $5 (+ charges) acceptable - or will the site attract more customers/more repeated custom to make up for the shortfall?

[jayreis]

Yes,
Paypal can handle what you are looking to do. You will want to look into the paypal IPN script. You can have paypal communicate with your friends website and setup a mysql database that will list all the confirmed/completed payments with the payers name.

Just keep in mind as the prior poster mentioned that paypal will take a % out of each transaction

[WargRider]

Thank you ardav and jayreis, I believe the transaction fee is fine. It will most likely make up for it, since people can pre book the game time and it would attract newer customers. Also thank you jayreis, now that I know the exact name of this "IPN script" I can probably implement. If I have any further problems, I will post on this thread. THank You!