In need of advice with the checkout process.

Davidc316

Hi ho,

I've just spent the past 4 months building an online shopping cart using PHP and MySQL. It's been a slow process and at times, a bit of a nightmare, but at last I'm at the stage where I can finally have users selecting items, deleting items, going to the shopping cart, viewing the total price and so on.

Anyway, there is one last hurdle that I need to get over before I can declare my little shopping cart finished.... the checkout process.

Could someone please give me a few pointers as to the best route to go?

I know that the typical response to that kind of question is to say "it depends on what type of merchant account you have... bla bla bla..."

-but in my case, it's literally just a pretend shop and I'm just using it for practice. For the sake of simplicity I'm also working under the assumption that the shop administrator would have a credit card number punching machine in his office (so there's no need for me to worry about integrating the cart with some kind of online credit card processing service).

So, in other words, all I need to do is to figure out the best way of obtaining customer credit card details SECURELY.

Could someone please advise me of the best way to do this?

I'd be particularly interested to find out what the norm is when someone submits credit card details on an online shop. Does that info get stored on a database or is the information sent to the shopkeeper via some kind of secure email system?

And what about the other customer details, such as shipping address, postcode and so on? Does that get the same treatment as the credit card details or does that slightly less sensitive info just get stored onto a MySQL database?

Thanks!

stolzyboy

well first of all i would look into secure socket layering, http://www.ssl.com

Davidc316

Thanks.

In truth, I know all about that and I know about the need to conduct the checkout process on a secure server.

I'm really hoping to find out a little more info of what processes should go on when a user is at the SSL.

stolzyboy

whatever you want to do, but usually ssl is used for securely passing information from the client to the webserver, ie when collecting CC's, soc. sec. #'s, etc... and when you do that you can encrypt/decrypt the information and place it into a db if you want to store it for later use, but for sensitive information, i would use some sort of encryption

Davidc316

Ok, I'm new to this so please let me run this past you....

How about the following solution?;

I have the checkout stored on SSL.
When the user enters their contact details (address and so on) then that information gets stored on a MySQL database.
When the user submits their credit card details then that very sensitive information is sent to the shopkeeper via PGP (encrypted secure email).

Does that sound like a good solution?

-please be mega critical!

Thanks!

stolzyboy

you can either do that last part via secure mail, or you can have an email sent to the person saying that there has been an order and then have an admin page for them to click to to view orders, and that email can have a link with info passed via url to it to grab the info after the admin logs in etc...

i would do it that way rather than sending the CC thru the email, then you can just decrypt the CC from the DB, but you need to make sure the admin page(s) are ssl'd also this way

Davidc316

Thanks for that.

Before I go about doing one of these methods, can I just run one more scenario past you????

How about this...

What if I just had the checkout page securely stored on SSL, then when the user enters his details (address, credit card details etc) then that info is sent to the shopkeeper's normal email address???

So I suppose what I'm asking here is, "Can I basically make the checkout page like a glorified contact us form (the only real difference being that this form is hosted on SSL?"

Would that be enough security to keep everyone happy?

stolzyboy

i would really think about doing it the way i told you to do it, there are a lot of email sniffers out there that can intercept email, and someone, can and will get the CC and other info a lot easier than if it were stored in the DB