best third party payment system?

[jbu311]

Hi everyone,
I didn't know where to turn for advice so I came here. I'm looking for a third party company to help customers at my site make their purchases. After a purchase, I need the company to provide some kind of service to make a mysql command to tell my database to update the number of credits a person has (a user will go to paypal to purchase credits and the mysql database should immediately update this information to reflect how many credits a user has).

Does anyone know of a way to do this through php/mysql/paypal, or is there a good, cheap third party solution?

Thanks in advance,

Julian

[silverbullet24]

well there are quite a few payment options out there. verisign, paypal, 2checkout.com. and i recently just checked out paysimple.com which seems interesting.

One thing is that you don't want anybody to be able to do remote database commands on your database. What you're looking for is more like an HTTP post command that you can parse and use to update your database. Paypal has it, and most others can do it as well.

One big thing is whether you want to host the payment processing yourself (verisign, paysimple, some paypal options) or have it hosted by a 3rd party (standard paypal, 2checkout.com, etc)

[Corey Bryant]

It really depends on the country you are in. Sometimes an IPSP (internet payment service provider) is better but if you are in the United States and doing more than $1,000 a month - a merchant accoun with an electronic payment gateway (LinkPoint, PayFlow, Authorize.net) will be better in the long run.