How to limit purchases that users can make on my website ?

Wow, i am so glad i found this community, i just started building my first website, i am no coder only using wordpress plugins and have background experience in design/photoshop.

I am looking to expand my knowledge base as to accomodate for building a complete website, so next thing i implemented after the somewhat so-so graphic design was woocommerce shop. So the next obvious step was protection vs chargeback and mass purchases.

What i plan to do is limit the number of items in the cart to say maximum of 2 (the type of product is such that people usually need one or two max in say a week or 10 days period). Now, there are premade plugins for this that limit the cart quantity, but thats not enough. The way that people can buypass this is just make multiple purchases of x2 of those items, and without limiting the number of times they can make full cart purchase the previous rule is simply not enough.

I am yet to find a plugin that offers this feature, the ones i've looked into only limit the cart quantity but they do not limit the number of times a cart can be filled within given timeframe. The optimal solution would be to have a maximum 1 purchase (regardless if cart filled to max or not) per say 36-48 hours and i only need it for some products and not all. Also the limits should be applied to the paypal payment email and not the website account that the user has made. If i only limit one website account, user can jsut make another one and use the same payment info.

Does anyone here know how can this be solved ? I know for a fact there are a lot of website with this feature, where people cannot make more than x purchases in a given timeframe, even ebay sales have such option, yet i am unable to make this work for now.

I hope i will learn a lot from this community and looks to me as if it is a really firm starting place for someone like me.
Cheers all, Bertrand

 

Unfortunately, I dunno of any exact plugins for this, but have you searched through Woocommerce's specific plugins? It would be weird if this is not implemented in some of them. There are plenty of pretty advanced payment/shipping plugins out there, so perhps look into them a bit more closely?

Only thing that might be problematic is that I dunno if Paypal sends you the paypal-email (or if you in any way can access that information) before the order is complete - ie. I'm not sure the process is straight forward, unfortunately. What you could do, perhaps, is force users to use their Paypal email when they sign up - ie, if the paypal-email doesn't match what they've registered with, no sale goes trough.

Although, that wouldn't stop people from paying with just their credit card via Paypal (no registered Paypal account)

 

Sorry, you can't do it easily: when redirecting on Paypal, you have no idea of the email your client will use. And there isn't this kind of options in Paypal to disallow this.

What you could do is:
Let the user pay. Paypal send you a notification when it pays. You read this notification, if it's from a Paypal email you already know, you send ship the item, and you automatically refund the customer.
You could hire a guy on Upwork to do this.