accepting payments on website

I have 2 pages for collecting payments for an online services business.

1st form collects basic information (name, address, dob, etc) from buyers and inserts into a mysql table

when 1st page is submitted it forwards user to a page where they can select service packages which is linked开发者_如何学JAVA to paypal payment gateway.

The scenario that i am facing is, after submitting the first page (data gets inserted to mysql) but lets say user decides not to pay for packages on 2nd page, i have redundant data in mysql table

Is there a way to manage this? should i combine payment collection + information collection in one page?

please advise,

If you don't want a customer to enter twice his personnal/shipping information, implement an account system, where a user creates an account with email/password, and his personnal/shipping information is linked to that account.

If you don't want an account system, you can make the folowing: when a user comes back, and if he already entered shipping information and didn't complete she payment, suggest him to reuse the previous information (by his cookie for example).

But anyway, there is not much you can do against a user that chooses to re-enter information (or create multiple accounts)

You have no redundant data in your database, you have potential customers that are interested in your product - but somehow didn't complete the payment step.

You could contact them later - having their email - and do some aftersales.

What you can do is set a timestamp on the data entered in the first page. Periodically, have a script run through the database and remove entries that are older than the last sweep. For example, if you run it daily, remove everything older than 2 days. Hourly, everything more than 2 hours, etc.