Hey everyone,

I design a website for a small college in NY. They want to have their application online so people can fill it out in a form (or email the pdf) and be able to pay their one time proccessing fee. What would be the best way for me to go about this?

Should I get a shopping cart?
Should I use paypal? (if so, can i require their SSN so I can match the payment with their application?)

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Also, it would be great if I could include the application in the SSL
-Steve

A shopping cart might be overkill. If PayPal is okay with you as a payment form, you can create an order form on you site that requires their SSN, then send all that info to PayPal (PayPal allows a few pass-through fields) via SSL, then it is sent back to you in an email. That would be the simplest way, IMO.

thats what I was thinking... do you know how many fields... i have about 60!

That's not going to work then. You get a text area field, and two custom fields of name/quantity.

For 60 fields, you will want to use an IPN solution. You'll have to insert their information into a database first, then send the order to PayPal, then PayPal will return a validation code which you can then use to activate their account in the database.

Not terribly difficult but time consuming if you haven't done it before. Try www.paypaldev.org and you may find some help or even premade solutions.