Topic awaiting preservation: Shopping carts & CC

I dont know if this is the most appropriate section for this but...

Im doing a website for my sister, and she wants to have a shopping card and the ability to process online credit card transactions. Unfortunately i havnt done this before and am a little unsure of the best way to go about it. Is there anyone here that has done this and could explain a little of how it works?

Is it best to download an already made shopping cart, are there php ones? And are there free ones? Or should i look into making my own. And can these link to a database i have setup, or do they include the database with them, kind of like phpBB forums etc.

As far as Credit Card transactions go, from what i can tell you normally pay a company that handles secure transactions like veriSign or someone? So i guess could anyone recommend a credit card company to do this with, and also how does this link in with the shopping cart? Do you just pass it a variable of the ammount or something?? Im a little confused in this area, and i dont think there is any free method of doing the credit card bit.

So any help would be greatly appreciated!

H][RO: Have a look around this FAQ - as luck would have it I updated it today with a nifty new cart (Zen Cart):

:FAQ: Can you help me set up a shopping cart on my site?

See what suits you (there are various levels of code available) and we can kick things around from there.

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org

That's useful, Emps, but it doesn't address Hiro's other question about who to set up the actual processing with. I'm about to encounter the same situation myself, so I'd be very interested in getting more information from the trusted souls at the Asylum. Google just turns up a bunch of commercial brag sheets -- I'm more interested in knowing if anyone has had some personal good or bad experiences with specific companies. Otherwise, we'll probably just end up finding the largest clicks-and-mortar bank which offers such services and going with them.

Cell 1250 :: alanmacdougall.com :: Illustrator tips

This is hard to find reliable information on, I dug and dug a few months back and didn't come up with any easy answers. In a nutshell:

You'll need to call the processing companies armed with a list of very specific questions regarding their services and contracts then cross check them. Poll as many as you can and pick the one that suits you. But universally: be careful as most of them have bits about their contracts they'd rather not mention. Sorry to induce paranoia but it's probably in your best interest to be thorough =[

The only place I've found good discussions going on on this subject is webmasterworld, search around in their e commerce forum for "payment gateway", "credit card processing", "secure certificates" - there was 2, maybe 3 excellent posts in there somewhere on the subject.

As for the original question, there's a thousand ways to do it, none are free, some are easier than others, but the easier methods usually take a larger chunk of your money per transaction.

Good luck. And I'm all ears for good merchant account payment gateway recommendations too =)



Jason

Great, well im doing this completely free for my sister, so she is just taking whatever other costs are involved. What i will do then is try maybe come up with some report with my findings at the end of it all that we all can benefit from.

Thanks for the FAQ emps i'll read it through thoroughly, its definately something i need to get done finally after all these years!

Ack the first link in your FAQ emp is broken, for the open source PHP one, it must have moved. I had a quick look but couldnt find it there, ill post it if i do.

Also regarding getting From the shopping cart stage to the credit card stage, i am assuming these are separate entities?

So your shopping cart would store the user session and have the total cost, then when you go "Checkout" im assuming it passes the final cost to the credit card Entity which then takes the details. This step is probably whats confusing me the most, however im sure its straight forward. I'm looking up a bit on it so ill post any great links i find

I've recently implemented Internet Banks & CreditCards for http://www.detfinns.nu/ in php/mysql and the process was fairly uncomplicated.

This part of the project consisted of two parts:
1 - create the shoppingcart/ad ordering system - this we built ourself since there was a lot of special client requests.
2 - hook up payment solutions.
Here we did some research and found that for creditcards there usually are two different types of solutions.

One where you create the actual page on your site where the client enters all cardinfo, this requires that you buy certificates for SSL and you are responsible for any information you save. Then you create the code to interact with the paymentsolutions API. This you get instructions and probably example code, we got all we needed from the provider we choosed (a local swedish provider).

Then there is the option to choose a paymentprovider that gives you a paymentpage on their server, somewhat customizable, then you just have to pass the collected info from you shopping cart (total price and so on) to their page, the client enters the info and pays.
This is the way I'd recommend if it's for a smaller site that needs to get up and running quickly.

For the payment providers you certainly will need to sign agreements and pay fees per transactions, possibly some setup fee as well so count that in in the budget.

I do know of some different providers here in sweden but I have no idea on whether they do things overseas or not. My best advice is that you research what other similar sites use, then take a personal contact, check for client-lists and so on.

Hope it helped a bit.
/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

PT:

quote:

---

That's useful, Emps, but it doesn't address Hiro's other question about who to set up the actual processing with.

---

Nope but as I suggested it was only the start of the discussion.

H][RO:

quote:

---

Ack the first link in your FAQ emp is broken, for the open source PHP one, it must have moved. I had a quick look but couldnt find it there, ill post it if i do.

---

It appears they have removed the PHPShop tutorial from the DevShed site pos. because it now has its own site and the tutorial would probably get outdated quite quickly - I have repalced it with a similarish but more general tutorial at DevShed.

For actually accepting credit card payments see this FAQ:

:FAQ: What do I need to know about accepting online payment?

Something like osCommerce will deal with the whole shooting match but I haven't use dit myself although I know some inmates/gurus have.

Anyway feedback/input on this kind of thing is very much appreciated

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org

found a link to a decent post at wmw

Jason

I've actually done this and it wasn't too bad. In terms of the credit card processing. There's a ton of ways to do this. First is to check, if whoever you are doing this for has an existing credit card processer. If so they might have an existing online credit card processing system. Then try their bank.

There's a couple of easy ways to do this if they don't have one already. Paypal has a plug-n-play sort of system that's really simple to integrate though it's not really a transparent system (you get kicked to paypal and then back to your site) Yahoo has another system for small businesses that's also easy to set up and more integrated.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

I've toyed with OSCommerce a lot on my machine at home while learning php and mysql (it was a great item to pick apart) and it really is a great solution for the novice like myself. They have a huge community of people using it and piles of input and answers about SSL and processing in their http://forums.oscommerce.com forums. for real production I'd stay away from using the daily snapshots and go with the official release. holler if you have a question on the product I can try to help if you use it



[Emp edit: Making link work]
[Skaarjj edit: Really making the link work. It has the wrong slashes in it...they should be /, not \

[This message has been edited by Emperor (edited 11-22-2003).]

[This message has been edited by Skaarjj (edited 11-22-2003).]

Thanks all thats great, helps alot.

Thanks for the info DmS, i think to start off i'd be safest with the second option and taking the security out of my own hands. I'm also assuming that the transaction company handles conversion rates also, incase someone is buying something from overseas. It would be a nightmare to have to implement that yourself i think.

Great FaQ on the CC emp, looks like ive got some reading to do this weekend. Im sure it will all go smoothly its always a bit dodgey when you havnt explored a new area before.

I think ill steer clear of paypal etc, its a bit annoying because people have to make accounts etc, i would rather they can just enter their CC details at the time of payment.

Looks to me like osCommerce might have some solutions i need, i'll have to try a few things out. I guess i can make my own shopping cart, it isnt that hard a thing to do once you have sessions in place i guess. (At least i hope its easy!) That way i can customize it completely to suit what i need. I guess the biggest issue would be keeping it secure for me, but if i handle CC offsite then i guess there isnt too much that needs to be secure.