Pass variables from PHP to Paypal and back

[jc_gmk]

I have a site which sells tickets to an event. I've chosen to use paypal on this occasion.

The way it works is, you submit a form directly to paypal and from that data it charges the customer.

The problem is that I need to use alot of that data for back end operations.
Therefore I would need to store the data in a database (MySQL).
But at what point sould I do that?

Can I send all of the forms variables to paypal and have them come back after the payment has been taken?

Or should I try and get the data into the database before the payment has been taken?

[boogyman]

paypal will return success or failure to their script which prints out the information accordingly.

You could contact paypal and ask about their policy to give your script some kind of success / failure receipt, however having all of the information return from paypal will simply just not happen.

My suggestion is to have you form sent to a script that will 1 put the data into your database and 2 send to paypal. Then if you are able to get a success / failure response from Paypal you can assign their access appropriately