Shopping cart help.

[begamer26]

That's just about exactly it, yes. You'd want to generate a list of values -- say, all 30-character combinations of upper-case letters and numbers (omitting the amiguous O, 0, 1 and I, giving you a huge number of starting combinations) -- then hash them all using a function that produces, say, a 16-character hex hash. Obviously, there are going to be a lot of collisions, since there's no way the starting combination space can even begin to fit it the end space. Pick a very few highly-populated hash values, and use the corresponding starting values as your activation keys, assigning one to a customer (you should run out of customers long before you run out of unique keys unless your game goes pan-galactic, and if you do run out, there's no real harm in going back to the top of the list and starting again). It will take some time to create the list, generate the hashes and extract the keys that will require the fewest number of stored hashes in the program, so be prepared for that. There are a lot of combinations in that working space.

As for the price, $14.99 to $29.99 is a sweet spot -- it's just expensive enough to seem like a real price, and just cheap enough to avoid being "real money". And do use the "multiple of five minus a penny or two" pricing; people will pay twenty bucks if the tag says $19.99, but not if the price is exactly $20.00. It's consumer expectation -- at $19.99, it seems like you took the time to work out a price, while $20.00 looks like you pulled a number out of ... (I'm sure you know the phrase, but this is a G-rated forum).

Ahhh! Thank you kindly! Two last questions, 1. Can I use this method, aswell as the method Callum talked about. So I can create the possibility of each code expiring after used 3 times. 2. Would someone easily be able to create their own combination if they have one expired key?

 

[essellar]

You can if the "activation" needs to be done online, but that needs an extra step. You'd have to store the hash and a salt external to the program since you'd need to generate a unique hash for every user, and it just starts getting complicated for no reason at that point if you want to secure that setup (you'd have to encrypt the salt and the hash for storage, then that leaves the initialization vectors vulnerable, and so on ad nauseum) -- it won't provide you any extra security, since people are in the awful habit of loading viruses/trojans without backup, and having to reinstall everything. If your game gives them trouble with that, then you've just taken another step down the road to guaranteed warez. Keep it simple -- you're not going to get money for every copy that's running out there unless it's so bad nobody would want to steal it (and even then...) so there's no point in annoying the nice people who are willing to pay.

 

[essellar]

Please don't resurrect old threads like this. And you aren't adding to the discussion anyway, you're just trying to promote your site. That's spam, and it's going to get you infracted if you persist.