title: Dealing with two people buying a unique item in an online shop at the same time
body: <p>I'm creating a simple online shop with PHP integrated with PayPal that sells unique items. What I'm wondering is how other shops deal with multiple people attempting to go through the payment process with the same item.</p>
  
  <p>This is my current draft strategy:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Items have three status types: available, on hold &amp; sold.</li>
  <li>As a user moves to the PayPal payment page it checks the status of all the items in the cart to ensure they're available. It also sets the item's status to "on hold" until they either come back after payment is confirmed or it times out (10 minutes? Not sure what this should be).</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Is this standard practice or is there a more practical way I should be going about this?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance!</p>