online Credit card payments with php ?

Brown

Hi everyone,

I am interested in learning how to accept credit card payments on a website.

Is this programming done with PHP? Is it secure enough?

If so, where can I get started with learning how to do this.

The scenario would be this:

I want ppl to be able to buy a recipe from an online recipe book
they would enter their name, #, address and credit card info.
then, the company selling the recipes would charge the person and if a valid credit card, mail the recipe to the person.

Any thoughts? Anyone?

Thanks.

AstroTeg

Yup it can be done.

Its as secure as you make it. The golden rule I live by is do not store the credit card number. Just process it online and be done with it and there's nothing for thugs to grab. Unless of course your credit card number validation routine has issues...

Beyond that, you'll need to find a payment gateway and get thier interface specs. Then you can write PHP code to talk to their servers and transfer the data over.

The gateway will make sure you're sending the data over correctly before setting you live. This gives you plenty of time to test and make sure your code handles a successful and failed transaction properly.

Brown

Hi AstroTeg,

Thanks for the reply.

Have you ever done something like this? Can you refer me to an easy-to-understand, good tutorial or something?

I still feel kind of confused on the topic.

I appreciate your time.

Thanks.

Percadan

What about the function payment_visa($ccnum, $amount, $account)
Sorry, just kidding.😃

AstroTeg

I've done it a number of times with ASP and will be doing it very soon with PHP.

Its not difficult to do, but VERY important to get it right the first time because you have so much at risk.

I'm not sure tutorials will help much. Each gateway is a little different. Each bank is a little different. Even each country is a little different.

Basically, if you're comfy coding, then you won't have a problem reading and developing an app (regardless of the language) to handle the credit card processing.

But if you're not at this point, then I'd recommend some really really serious research (and not really just tutorials, but find books on the subject and/or people who know what they're doing). If you don't understand the basic concepts of the entire process, you'll have problems working in validation checking and error handling. Trial and error can be the best teacher, but you may not be able to afford it if its with your credit card processing code.

So if you still think this is something you can manage, I'd recommend getting the specs from the bank and gateway regarding how you are to talk to their equipment. And go from there... (they should be able to provide you information to perform testing which is very valuable)

alanzhao

Check this out:

http://www.verisign.com/resources/gd/enablePayment/index.html

mmilano

the 'gateway' is basically the web services which handle your requests between your site and the merchant bank.

you really need to setup the merchant account / gateway ( or test account ) before you can really start working on it.

this is because each company could have different parameters, request variable names, response variable names, and sets of codes in the responses which indicate if the trasaction was approved, declined, and why.

read up on Curl as this is my favorite way of passing requests and receiving responses for this use.

if you don't want to spend all the $ on setting up merchant accounts to test on, .. you could sign up with UPS and work on an app that gets shipping quotes. it's basically the same concept .. you send them a set of variables, they send you stuff back.

have fun 🙂