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up vote 8 down vote favorite

I'm looking for a "pay what you want" system like www.humblebundle.com had during their last software bundle action. Where can I find such a system? It only needs to support PayPal and should send a link with the download path to the user.

Any ideas welcome.

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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

I think you can go by handling the non-fixed price yourself.

The thing is to propose a nice UI to increment/decrement the price (a form with +/-). You can even propose to copy the average price of the last 5 people who bought this item.

When the price is set, you can handle the form :

  • if it's < 1$, just say "Thank you for your offer, but with the paypal transaction cost, I don't get a penny, so I prefer to offer the product to you. Here is the link. If you really want to buy it, you can go back to the previous page."
  • if it's > 1$, "Thanks for your purchase, just click this button to pay with Paypal" and you generate the button with the amount

Note that the paypal button appears only at the last stage, you can also propose other payment methods.

If you have several items, you can use a shopping system and set all prices to 0 and customize it to not show the prices anywhere. Then, on the last page, you ask for the total payment the user want to do and use your customized form instead of the one proposed by the shopping system.

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up vote 0 down vote

Are you looking for a full shopping cart system or just a way to have a way that people can pay for something with an not fixed amount?

I believe that paypal's built in buttons allow for a pay what you want option. So if you have just one or a few items, you could just use a paypal button. Paypal buttons give you an option to forward the buyer to a specific place after purchase (your download link).

That doesn't really help if you have a bunch of items though.

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I've around 10 items. I'm looking for a way that people can pay something with a NOT fixed amount - also people should enter $0 if they want to. On Paypal: What happends if a user "pays" nothing? Does PayPal proceed the user to the download link if no real purchase happend? – Bob Mar 8 '11 at 19:59
3  
Paypal's minimum transaction is 1 cent, so if you must have a $0 transaction, this method won't work. Although you could use a bit of javascript to check the amount and have the form submit to a different location if the amount is 0. – lovefaithswing Mar 8 '11 at 20:59
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PayPal is a payment system. They have no interest in transactions without an actual amount, for obvious reasons. Even if they did, you're technically using their services and so they should be allowed to bill you transaction/services fees, which is kind of silly. I'd try @lovefaithswing's idea: only send them to Paypal if they're actually paying otherwise, just give them the thing. – Su' Apr 7 '11 at 20:11
up vote 0 down vote

E-junkie offers a 'name your price' feature that lets buyers choose their price. You can set the minimum and suggested amounts, leaving the minimum price blank if you want buyers to be able to download products for free.

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up vote 0 down vote

you could do this using a wufoo form, using rules

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