Accept credit card payments

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josh
DevNet Master
Posts: 4872
Joined: Wed Feb 11, 2004 3:23 pm
Location: Palm beach, Florida

Accept credit card payments

Post by josh »

I don't need help collecting any billing information, I can already do that, but my question is once I have the credit card number what can I do to charge the card?

Everyone says paypal is the easiest way except I am not sure exactly how their service works. What I want to be able to do is the following:
Input their credit card number (over SSL) - [no problem]
Store their # into a variable - [no problem there]
Send the credit card # over a secure connection, and send the amount to bill the card for, and get a responce wether the transaction went through [umm, help?]
take the responce and if its true then add the order into a mysql table full of orders that need to be shipped, store the last 4 digits of their CC#, the card type, the expiration date, the product order, total amount they paid, what item etc.... if the order failed then foward them to a page explaining what went wrong - [no probelm there]


What services are there to do this, I thought paypal was just for donations. Do they offer support to bill the credit card for X amount of dollars, without the user registering a paypal account, and without the user ever seeing the word paypal anywhere? If not what other free/cheap services will allow me to do this?

Thanks
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markl999
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Location: Manchester (UK)

Post by markl999 »

I would definetely hand this off to a merchant. The burden/responsibilty of having cc numbers passing through your server is too great imho. Merchants like PayPal, Worldpay, myvirtualcard etc are setup to deal with cc transactions and are certified by the likes of TRUSTe.
You can still get the same functionality (notification of payment etc) without ever having to see/store any cc details though i doubt it will be totally transparent, the client will have to know who their dealing with, but they'd probably feel more secure with a known name anyway ;)
josh
DevNet Master
Posts: 4872
Joined: Wed Feb 11, 2004 3:23 pm
Location: Palm beach, Florida

Post by josh »

Ok, so paypal will allow me to accept credit cards,

Several questions
Do my customers need a paypal account?
If the order is fowarded through paypal, what kind of assurance do I have that the user actually paid, is there any way a user could copy and paste the URL they get fowarded to after paying and go order that same item over and over but only pay once?
Legal issues: I am building a online store for a small business, what happens when some one screws them over and for some reason there is a lawsuit, who is responsible for the lawsuit, am I accountable, or paypal?
rehfeld
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Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 8:14 pm

Post by rehfeld »

customers dont need a paypal account anymore(they used to until recently).

paypal has apis to notify you who, when and how much they paid you etc...as far as submitting the same order multiple times using 1 payment, thats your job to prevent that,

legal issues depend upon if it was your fault or or paypals etc...but unless you really screw up it would be hard for you to take the blame. still, even using thier apis you need to be aware of security issues.

look at sandbox.paypal.com

immense amounts of developer tools/info there

theres also lots of links on paypals homepage
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