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I have a simple 'Buy Now' Google Checkout button on my Django site (very simple; no basket or anything more fancy). What I want is for Google to send a notification to a URL on my server once a new order has been processed. The notification should tell me the customer's email address and name (preferably as simple POST params). Then I can take this info and set up a user account, send out a confirmation email, etc.

This sounds simple. However, all I can find by way of documentation on Google's site is a dense and impenetrable thicket of competing versions, protocols, and APIs with no clear tutorials or example code. It is a nightmare.

Furthermore, I can see no obvious way of testing out the functionality. I continually see references to a 'sandbox', but I can find no concrete information on what this is or how to set it up. The URL 'sandbox.google.com' returns a 503 error.

Can anybody give me a pointer?

Thanks in advance.

Tom

Tom Scrace
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    Hi Tom. I did a site once that implemented Google Checkout, and it was a total pain in the a$$. I got all of the information I needed from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Django-Ecommerce-Experts-Development/dp/1430225351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1310231948&sr=8-1 as Google's documentation is pretty hard to follow in my opinion. – Brandon Taylor Jul 09 '11 at 17:20
  • Thanks for that recommendation Brandon; I'm browsing through the contents on Amazon right now and it looks like it might be helpful. It seems a bit crazy that we have to buy a huge book just to get something so simple done, but Google's docs seem to be all over the place on this one. Thanks again. – Tom Scrace Jul 09 '11 at 17:38
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    I'm going to ditto Brandon's book recommendation... with reservations. I just bought it yesterday. Yes, it helped me set up a Google webstore in less than a day. OTOH, it's very beginnerish, and spends a lot of time teaching me Django. I know Django; half my reputation here is from Django. And the Google Checkout example code does not (repeat, does NOT) handle Google Checkout Notification API at all. You'll have to figure that out on your own. I get to do that Monday. Joy. – Elf Sternberg Jul 10 '11 at 02:20
  • Very interesting, thanks Elf. The notification API is pretty much all that I am interested in, so maybe this book is not for me. I guess I'll just have to struggle on with what I can glean from the official docs, fragmented and poorly written as they are. I feel like it will actually be fairly simple to do what I want; it is just a matter of wading through the documentation to find the necessary information. – Tom Scrace Jul 10 '11 at 02:28
  • Luckily, I didn't have to mess with the Notification API at all. I made quite a few tweeks to the code presented in that book. As @Elf mentioned, the book does a lot of hand holding. Most of the E-commerce stuff I do now uses Authorize.net and the quix.pay library: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/quix.pay/ – Brandon Taylor Jul 10 '11 at 03:05

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Take a look at how Satchmo handles notifications in: payment.modules.google

Adam
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