Selling images on iweb through paypal

Question

I would like to sell my photos on my iweb site through paypal and having customers download the digital copy after they have payed through paypal.. i have figured out the html snippets you have to use but i would like to find out the best way to link it all together.. any help would be much appreciated
my website link...
http://www.angellsurfphotography.com/AngellSurfPhotography/Home.html
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<Edited by Moderator>

Answer 1

Hello Karlos and welcome to the forum!
PayPal offers a landing page upon purchase but you are only allowed to set up one landing page so the idea of having a separate landing page for each item is out of the question. Basically the one landing page you are allowed is a link you can click on to go back to your website after the purchase confirmation page of PayPal which shows receipt of purchase item number, quantity, shipping address (if applicable) etc.
The landing page must abide by PalPal terms including certain criteria that must be shown on your landing page. Further detail is available on PayPal website.
The person who purchases a product is emailed a receipt and you are also emailed a copy of the receipt. Theoretically you could setup an email address rule in Mail so when you receive an email from someone who makes a purchase you automatically email them a URL to download the image or you can send it as an attachment through the rule setup through Mail.app
The downside is you have to rely on the Mail rule to function properly it might be a little bit of trial and error to get the correct rules setup for it setting rule variables such as item number, etc. Also depending on how many digital download packages you have it could be cumbersome to maintain and setup all the files and related Mail rules for all of them. Also you would have to have your computer on with Mail.app running to have the application process the received emails into Mail rules and send a reply with attachment. If you had your computer off overnight and Mail wasn't running to process the rule and send an email upon purchase a customer would have to wait until you turned your computer on to get their download purchase.
The ideal method for this situation is to use watermarked images as preview on website and use php to require account creation and login on your website and have visitors login and view their account information where they are able to download their purchases through encrypted link. The link cannot be copied and given to someone else since it is encrypted and even if it weren't encrypted account login is required to access the file anyway. Also php can set up so visitors who purchase can only download the file a certain number of times. You can have it so they can only download the file once, twice, 10 times. PHP is the very best method in this situation no question the list of pros regarding this matter are endless.
PayPal can still be used in php method as a payment gateway. Unless you have a merchant account setup with your bank you can use other payment gateways like authorze.net or similar to make the payment transition from ones credit card to your bank account. PayPal can be used to create shopping carts for physical items but if you want to have a commerce site for digital download material you can still use PayPal but there's a lot of ingenuity involved. With regard to iWeb it's a little out of the applications' ability. I can easily say this would be a lot of work for the inexperienced user.
Best of luck to you.