Good mornin' all,

I use PayPal to process payments on my site and I would like to include an area where visitors pay a fee to download various files. So basically they would click the 'buy' button, be transferred to PayPal, enter their details and then be transported to the page containing the username and password for the protected area.

Now, adding the password etc. is not difficult but I was wondering how I would go about making the page with the details on only available after exiting PayPal and not available by simply typing in the URL?

For example:

User clicks 'Buy' and is transferred to PayPal > Enters details > Transferred to password page, call it www.domain.co.uk/password > Access granted to protected area

But I don't know how to stop visitors being able to type in just www.domain.co.uk/password and going straight to the page without first going through PayPal.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

You will have to password protect the page - Probably using ASP or some other server side scripting.

If you are going to use paypal you can set your signup process like this.

Click signup and go to paypal
After paypal they redirect to a password signup form page or
you can just auto respond with a pre-set password that you change after a time frame or
If you only have a few signups you can just make a group access file and add users after you recieve payment.

another option is to just use ccbill and they can handle all that for you for free but i think they take 14% but you can just bump you cost up to fix that. They give access to your members area with many payment options.

my2cent

Usually if members have to use paypal at any point of time... They should be in a protected site... Juz look at the bottom of ur IE, there should be a lock there.

If you wan to bring them to a password- protected page before click on another link (to that paypal site) inside that protected page, you might wan to do some scripting to your webpages... CGI or php for example can help to place password protection to specific pages or so...

Maybe you can check out:
http://php.resourceindex.com/
http://cgi.resourceindex.com

Some membership scripts are available at Hotscripts

try searching paypal at HotScripts.com

PayPal Develper site https://developer.paypal.com/ has some APIs to use if you are a programmer.