just wondering...e-commerce

[cougarhockey]

I was just thinking about things and my cousin wants an e-commerce site built for his store that sells stuff like GNC. anyways if i was going to build a site for that for people to actually order online via credit card how is it processed? Is the info simply saved into a database and an employee runs the info through their credit card machine or is there code to actually verify the info and process it with the credit card company automatically?

I know i could probably find this info somewhere else but thought i'd just ask you all who have a lot of experience

John
PS this is just ponderings for possible future stuff, nothing i'm in the process of working on

[planetsim]

Firstly there are a few aspects in E-commerce

Security, Processing

Security would include verifying CC details via a Merchant Account or by a 3rd party such as PayPal which will automatically accept payments.

From there you need to be able to have a very secure database that is not viewable and not suspectable to being attacked. Keeping Raw CC details is not a wise idea it should be encrypted via some way.

That is just very basic outlook of it. E-Commerce is quite complicated. You should probably read up on a few E-commerce tutorials and maybe think about getting a Ecom Book on Security or such.

[superwormy]

You can have a merchant account run the numbers... or you could SECURLY store the CC info. and run them by hand on a CC machine.

[cougarhockey]

and i take it that it would cost some $$ for a merchant to automatically run the numbers?
Does anyone have a book or two or three that they would suggest? I'm still in college and have 12 credit hours of "readings" left to do which I pick a topic (e-commerce, php, asp,....etc) and each credit hour equates to 1 book....so if i do e-commerce 3 books, php 3 books, and flash 3 books, i hope that should allow me to be a fairly good web designer/programmer since i already have extensive knowledge with photoshop and digital photography

thanks for the info guys

[Robert_Blackwel]

Here's what I think you'll need.
SSL or Shared SSL connection to securely receive customer info and or credit card information
For SSL you'll need a certificate. I've linked to a great resource below.

Now, after you've obtained the customer information, you can process it manually through your local POS terminal/software client.

OR sign up for a gateway (if I understand correctly, a gateway communicates with yoursite and your merchant, it does the credit card verification and then deposits to your merchant account).

I have done some researching for various merchant accounts and rates etc. Godaddy.com takes the cake!! The best deal I've seen for merchant accounts (atleast, for small businesses).

http://www.sslreview.com/content/table/index.htmlview rates here

e-mail [e-mail] and tell him I sent you.

Now, you can get your gateway from a number of places, but godaddy has affiliated with authorize.net and they can set you up with that too. There are complete instructions for connecting to the gateway on their site (they support both SSL and shared SSL)

Hope that helps some.