Quote:
Originally Posted by Aurel
I have written some specialized software in Labview that has proven very useful for the characterization of solar cells in my lab. It is using a very common general purpose instrument. I see a possible market with other university laboratories who want to get in solar cell testing. My idea is to try to sell the program online, by making an e-commerce website for downloading that sofware. Since I have no idea how well it is going to sell, I would like to develop this at minimal cost, keeping in mind that I am not a web developer by trade, just an amateur who can learn fast. As an example, here is the website I made for my lab:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~adupasqu/
So, my question to the pros is: what basic tools do I need for secure payments (VISA, paypal...) and software protection. Ideally I`d like to find them for free, or really cheap. I plan on selling the software for $99, bearing in mind that the pro version made by the instrument company is several thousands. I like to use NVU for making the website. Thanks to the brain trust  . |
I recently did this kind of thing myself... I had put together some video processing software for my own use a couple of years ago, and had several people see the results and tell me that there's a market for it (especially when they found out that it could do a Traqmate data overlay). I tied up the loose ends and continued to develop it, then made a website and put it out there as shareware (ie there's a usable free version out there, or people can get more features for a small price). The website is
http://www.RaceRender.com if you want to check it out.
What I did was use PayPal and their Instant Payment Notification (IPN) feature, which is actually pretty easy. When someone submits a payment from the "Buy Now" button on my website, PayPal processes it and then contacts a payment notification PHP script at the URL that I specified in my PayPal account preferences. The script is given the details of the transaction via a HTTP POST connection, then it contacts PayPal's server to verify it, and e-mails the user with the activation code for the premium features. You should be able to also have the script e-mail a whole file if you wanted to (you'd just have to encode the embedded file in the e-mail message, or use a function that does it for you). I do most of my coding in C and don't really even "know" PHP, but it was pretty easy to figure it out enough to do what I needed.