Create A Digital Contents Store Under Google Sites with PayPal Shopping Cart

Google Apps has become one of the most popular (Cloud Computing) IT solution for the businesses, the built-in Google Sites is a very powerful tool for publishing the web contents. The Google Sites uses the Gadget concept to create the pages, it does offer all kind of gadgets for you to choose, however, for the shopping cart gadget beside the Google Checkout Store Gadget I didn't find any gadget can offer a simple shopping cart with PayPal checkout function and Google Checkout Store Gadget only accepts Google Checkout payments.

Quite a few my customers are using PayPal as their internet merchandise service, in order to help them to accept Credit card and PayPal payments, I have developed some Gadgets for them to embed into their Google sites. The shopping Cart concept is the same as Google Shopping Cart Wizard, a Google Spreadsheet is used to maintain the store items.

When creating the Gadget, the administrator needs to decide to use PayPal BuyNow or PayPal Shopping Cart feature, and add the correct Paypal email address, the final step to to decide which Google Spreadsheet to use. Once finish, a simple layout shopping store will be generated right away! Anything you change on the spreadsheet will be updated on the web site too.

The demo case is a photo gallery store which customers need to download the photo right afetr they pay. Therefore, the PayPal Web Site Payment Standard API has been implemented to process the real time transactions. Once the server receive the payment confirmation from PayPal, an email will send to the buyer with a digital link which points to the download site of the digital content (photo image). All the contents are stored in the Google Docs without public access, the server agent needs to find out  the link and make it accessable for the new customer and generate the email with the link to specified customers.