Automating purchase system

[Aggrav8d]

This morning I woke up, made a hot drink, turned on my monitor, and promptly spit a mouthfull into my keyboard. Someone had purchased my game! First copy ever! Hooray for me!

Once I recovered from the shock of it all I promptly generated a unique key and fired off my templated email response. But it did occur to me that I should have to do anything - I should be free to program or sleep or go to the gym or WHATEVER...while the computer fills out orders on my behalf.

What would you, who have implemented similar systems, reccomend that I do? I receive two different kinds of automatically generated emails with details about who bought what. I imagine an MTA that checks the subject of messages to the sales@marginallyclever.com account and directs the relevant emails to some kind of process that generates a new key (checking for collisions against a database), fires off the response email, and updates the client and accounting database(s).
I am very new to linux administration, I still can't get my MTA to work.

Any and all thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[Kai Backman]

Your easiest bet would be to get the payment processor to generate a "keycode". They usually do that by polling an URL on your site with the information from the completed sale. You can then run this information into the database and send any additional emails required. I would suggest you get your head around PHP/MySQL, you will benefit plenty from those skills in the long run.

I used to run a mail filtering system (email to a specific account was processed by the server) but this was cumbersome and I'm a pretty seasoned Linux admin. It also broke completely when changing hosting company.

You basic point is head on the mark. Automate everything you can. Removing manual processing steps will help your unconscious to accept higher levels of sales.. :)

[princec]

Congratulations :) It's a great feeling. I still get it even now when I get a sale! It makes my day rosy when it happens.

I automated my system by using SWREG advanced level linking. You give them a keycode generation URL, and they post an HTTP request with a load of parameters like name, address, game, etc. to your URL. You process the URL in some way and generate a code and send it back to SWREG as the HTTP response, and they stuff it in an email which they send back to the punter. Several of the other reg services have this option available.

Cas :)