How to provide on-line purchasing

April 4, 2006 12:49 AM

I've successfully developed my own website using HTML and CSS. Now I need to add simple facilities for customers to order and pay on-line. What are some good on-line tutorial sites to help me?

My web host provides secure server support, and I don't think I'll have trouble writing a page of forms - it's the standard name, address and credit card details. Where I do need help is with the retrieval, storage and processing of the information the customers input. I know nothing about it.

posted by TiredStarling to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Paypal.
posted by tiamat at 12:59 AM on April 4, 2006

Yes, I've considered Paypal, but the business is in New Zealand and the customers are in New Zealand, so a simple "give me your VISA number" approach is what I need. (Otherwise the currency gets converted twice before it reaches me; also membership of Paypal is much lower (per capita) than in the US.)
posted by TiredStarling at 1:04 AM on April 4, 2006

One real problem with this is if you are accepting users' credit card numbers suddenly everything about your security needs to be absolutely airtight. There's a lot more incentive to hack you and the consequences if it happens are much worse.

That's one huge advantage of using paypal (or something similar) is you don't have any data sitting around anywhere at all.
posted by aubilenon at 1:31 AM on April 4, 2006

New Zealand? Try contacting DPS or WorldPay.

(is your site online yet?)
posted by holloway at 1:49 AM on April 4, 2006

Go with a third party provider. Please. For everyone involved. The liability issues that you will face if you are directly accepting credit cards will be a HUGE headache.
posted by antifuse at 2:12 AM on April 4, 2006

I agree, please don't accept or store any sensitive information from customers, put it all through a solid, reputable third party service such as WorldPay.
posted by malevolent at 2:36 AM on April 4, 2006

membership of Paypal is much lower (per capita) than in the US

PayPal offer merchant services so that the users don't need to be a member. It is just a form like you would make, only hosted externally, and integrated into your payment process. I cannot vouch for it as I haven't used it, but it seems like a reasonable solution to your situation.
posted by MetaMonkey at 2:41 AM on April 4, 2006

I just want to drop in right here and recommend anything OTHER than osCommerce. I've been fighting with that damned thing as a contracter for the past month, and from a guy who's seen the insides of that monster: DON'T DO IT.

If you ever want to change or add anything you have days of work ahead of you. Frustrating, error-prone work.

Also, I'd like to second the warning against you collecting credit card numbers yourself. If you DO choose to go this route, set up your system so it retains credit card information only as long as required for the current transaction. It's frustrating to me as a consumer knowing my credit card number and all the details required to charge me again and again lay all around the internet on the various systems I've used to purchase things. I'll take the PayPal payment choice any time, just to reduce the number of databases my CC# shows up in.
posted by Imperfect at 6:47 AM on April 4, 2006

Another plus for using PayPal is that you don't need to pony up for an SSL certificate which don't come cheap (at least they didn't last time I looked) or aquire a merchant account/credit card processor which is a field plagued by sharks.
posted by zeoslap at 7:29 AM on April 4, 2006

I recently (foolishly) took on a project to set up a simple site to sell items via CC. after much research, I ended up using Yahoo! Store, because otherwise I would have gone insane trying to knit together multiple backend systems - the shopping cart, the merchant account, the payment gateway, etc. Yahoo! Store makes it a bit simpler, although you then run into new limitations inherent to their system. (Although many of the limitations that I have run into are partly due to the fact that this site needs to be self-sufficient, and the owner needs to be able to add new products without writing any HTML herself.)

ANYWAY, this said, even if you have taught yourself lots of other web technologies, don't fool yourself into thinking "setting up a site to take CC orders should be simple!". It is not simple. It's very, very hard and I didn't trust myself to be able to make it secure, since I really know nothing about security.

One other nice and simple option, if you already have a CC merchant account, and can edit the site yourself, is to use Mal's E-commerce for a hosted secure shopping cart and CC collection system. It collects the CC info from your site, and then you just login and collect the numbers and pass them along to the merchant account yourself. I used this very successfully for a site a few years ago that is still humming along.
posted by chr1sb0y at 9:13 AM on April 4, 2006

Oh yeah - and Mal's E-commerce really is free - the pay version offers the bonus of a download tool for multiple orders. The free version limits you to logging in and collecting each transaction separately. I assume the pay version funds the free version, and most folks pay to upgrade. One of my clients is still using the free version after 5 years and it's worked out very well.
posted by chr1sb0y at 9:17 AM on April 4, 2006

I really like Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.
posted by Ostara at 10:35 AM on April 4, 2006