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How to sell games securely via PayPal?
Posted by bobbobowitz
October 14th, 2012 9:34 am
I set up my website, got hosting and all that, have a PayPal account.
How do you sell games with PayPal? Only way I can see would be to have people pay and then be linked to a download page hosted by the server. But then anybody can just go straight to that download page and get the game without paying.
How do you solve this problem? I’m open to any other solutions, including non-paypal ones, as long as they aren’t very expensive.
We use the free version of a WordPress plugin named Cart66 – of course, everybody can share the download link nonetheless. With Cart66 you can limit the number of possible downloads – but if you have a problem with people having the possibility to copy your game you will have a hard time selling digital content, unless you add some DRM, which is evil. Just treat your customers with respect.
A better solution (especially if you don’t use WordPress) might be BMT Micro or a similar service, because they already do the taxes for you. Of course, there are fees then.
Seriously? They do taxes? I was told they didn’t…
AFAIK, yes. A quick research gave me that thread: http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?15428-BMT-and-VAT
There’s a big difference between “doing the taxes for you”, and adding the VAT tax to European transactions.
Haha, right. Sorry for being so unspecific.
Ah, that makes more sense.
I’ve got to start doing more diligent research.
PayPal has at least two different APIs for confirming a successful payment. You have to chew through a little PHP but I’m pretty sure there are step-by-step tutorials or even ready-made frameworks for that. After you confirmed a payment for a specific user, you can then allow them to download the game. Of course you’ve got to have a basic register/login thing going on on you page.
Once you grasp the weird Paypal APIs, it’s actually not too hard – still, if you’ve never done this sort of web development, you might want to google for readymade solutions.
Hi,
I don’t know if it will help you but a few months ago I created:
Deliver It Enthusiastic! My Indie Delivery Service (DIEMIDS)
(https://github.com/labe-me/diemids).
I still don’t use it in production but sure want to in the near future
The delivery system use AWS secure cloudfront.
The project contains a script to help configure the beast.
Basically, you tell the deliverer which emails can download which URL and It will generates secure download link to cloudfront for each click (so you can kill an email if you find an abuse).
The project contains a pretty complete working example of paypal digital goods integration (https://github.com/labe-me/diemids/tree/master/example).
All this is for nodejs but it can help understand the process anyway
Regards
Mr Laurent Bedubourg