Topic awaiting preservation: Website Digital Certificates

I see these alot for people advertising ecommerce sites, could someone tell me what they are, what they are for and if i set up a shopping cart which uses an external company to handle credit card transactions... do i need these certificates?

Thanks

If you are handling the transaction on your site (i.e. you take in data and send it via a socket or some other device to the bank) then you might need an SSL certificate. If the external company handles the transactions they would need the certificate.

The certificate performs a service of both providing a level of encryption for data as it is being transmitted as well as allowing the customer to verify that the person they are sending their information to is in fact who they expect it to be.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SSL-Certificates-HOWTO/

You normally would buy or get a certificate from a trusted source, and then install it on your web server. It is important that if you get your own cert that Microsoft has the source as a trusted signer, otherwise the annoying "This certificate can not be verified" message will pop up. That is annoying.

This is a complex area, probably the most complex area in web design and development, the good thing is that there is a whole lot of material available to make things easier. Do your research so you don't get burned.

If you do end up wanting to make your own for some reason, these instructions seemed easy enough to follow to get it done.

http://sapiens.wustl.edu/~sysmain/info/openssl/index.html

-Butcher-

Ok thanks for that, well looks like im FINALLY getting around to doing myown shopping cart site with credit card transactions. ITs really the one big area which i havn't had a chance to get into yet (so its a bit daunting!) deep down i know i can do it, but its just worrying because i have never done it before.

What i think i will do is either make my own shopping cart (or am i better off downloading a free one thats made already?) and then passing it on to an external company to do the CC transaction.

So if i do it this way im assuming i dont need secure certificates on my server. What i am curious about is how it actually takes place... on my server the shopper would have selected items to purchase and have a final ammount that they need to pay,

Basically im not sure how things go down after that, do you just pass the ammount to the external company (i hope this is easy to do)... and does this site send some email to me so i know that the transaction was sucessful and then i can send out the goods?

I have looked things up in google its just hard to get a straight answer .. all i want is someone who has done it to explain these steps and that would be great :P

So if anyone can help with some info i would much appreciate it, thanks all!

No one?

If you are going to be using an external source you need to talk to them. They all offer different services, and they will tell you how it works. This is not easy and we can't have all the answers because it is complex and very vendor dependant. I can't tell you the number of hours I have had to spend on the phone with e-commerce technical support trying to figure out why function x didn't perform effect y.

If you have a specific question there might be some help for you, but these questions tend to be API specific and you aren't telling us and most likely won't know the API you are going to be using. You will need to handle this through their technical support.

There are no set steps, it totally depends on your vendor.

From this you should do some research on some vendors, I have not had to deal with shopping cart issues since 2001 so I don't know anything about who the good vendors are. It is not easy. You should be prepared to read some hundreds of pages of information reguarding these issues. As soon as you start accepting money over the internet you become responsible for a whole slew of legal issues. Make sure you read all you can on these issues, or make sure your e-commerce vendor has this all worked out for you.

Ok thanks WM, i was hoping there was a simpler step process... but i see there isnt.

Looks like its time to dive head first into it! Thanks anyhow for the advice!