A question about developing a shopping cart

[JasonT]

As many of you know, having an online store without the ability to pay with credit card would most likely be a huge disappointment.

My question is, if a programmer was to create a shopping cart to be licensed out to various clients, all in which use different merchant accounts, how would the programmer create a universal interface to suit all merchant accounts?

Do merchant accounts abide to a convention in processing form data? Because if clients used various merchant accounts, I find no clausible way to write a shopping cart that could be used by many different clients.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jason

[weekender]

can't you use an abstraction layer? if you look in the code section of phpbuilder, there will be lots of database abstraction layers - take a look at these for pointers. theory goes like this - you create a variable which states which type of merchant account (or db) you are using, and then a set of functions which are called regardless of what merchant (or db) is used, check which is used and then perform the correct code for that merchant.

so i would have a variable like this

$merchant_type = "paypal";

and a function like this

function make payment (ccnumber, account, etc...) {
if ($merchant_type == "credite mutuel"){
execute the make payment code for credite mutuel
};
if ($merchant_type == "paypal"){
execute the make payment code for paypal
}
return $status;
}

not quite sure on my syntax, but you get the idea

ads

[JasonT]

Thank you for your help, but it seems like there are an indefinite amount of merchant accounts available, and that the use of such an abstraction layer would still make the shopping cart limited to a select few merchants.

I was hoping that a convention might exist that most shopping carts follow, but through my research on various search engine, my results are inconclusive.

Thanks,
Jason