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E-Commerce Question...

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 5:10 pm
by jdhorton77
Hello all, I'm basically needing some advice from some experienced developers out there. I'm currently developing an e-commerce site for a company and I was talking to some fellow developers one day and they brought up the topic of liability. Now I've been working on this site for some time now and have a good bit of the design created, but what I'm curious about is if any one out there knows of some software that I could purchase that would be like a "buy now button". Where I create the pages and the database, but I buy some software that would make the secure transaction for me. I'm just trying to stay away from any liability from credit card information being stolen.

Or if any one out there can help me with an easy tutorial on how to process a secure transaction that might be doable also. But unfortunately I'm under a bit of a time constraint and that's why I was looking for the third party software. I have talked with the owner and he wants to use Verisign as the certificate. Anyway, I do appreciate all the help. This site is a total life saver.

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 5:16 pm
by Luke
Look into one of these:

http://www.miva.com - Proprietary, very simple to set up, but you lose a lot of control over how the store works. Also need a host who supports it
http://www.zencart.com - PHP - customizable... I've never used it
http://www.oscommerce.com - PHP - customizable... people get frustrated with it, but it's very popular.

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 5:23 pm
by RobertGonzalez
First thing you should do is consult with an attorney to verify that you'd be liable for any 'issues' that arrive from your code. Then I'd look into payment gateways that handle all of the payment processing for you so you never even see your customers information. That can only serve to help you.

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 5:54 pm
by jdhorton77
Thanks guys, that's a start. The attorney idea isn't a bad one. All I know is that I'm a poor little college student that can't really afford a large lawsuit at this moment.

So how hard is it to use a SSL socket. And has anyone ever used a Verisign certificate, or such, to encrypt the data to be processed. Thanks again.

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 5:59 pm
by RobertGonzalez
It isn't that hard.

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 6:01 pm
by Luke
not that hard. I've found that verisign is ridiculously overpriced though

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 6:06 pm
by jdhorton77
I agree with the over priced comment. But I guess it's the name that he likes. Kinda like buying a $80 pair of jeans when a pair of $25 Levis would surfice.

So is there a good tutorial out there with example code to show how to use the SSL?

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 6:14 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Try google. He usually know a lot. :wink:

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:31 pm
by MrPotatoes
Miva i would never use. i had it for about 2min before i started to shop elsewhere for new ones.

zen cart is just stupid. i have it and i hate it. i wish the shop would let me make a whole new one. i mean, seriously. this thing is gigantic and slow as hell and shoot, hard to work with most of the time. too many features and the over-rides system is *ugh* dumb.

there isn't enough i could say about it. i just wish i could make my own

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:52 pm
by alex.barylski
I'm curious...what is it about a eCommerce shopping cart that make's it so difficult to (re)build?

I've never worked on one...but I have on many other enterprise applications (KBase, CRM, CMMS, CMS, ERP, etc)...

I'm considering maybe developing my own :) I've had three people in the last 2 weeks ask me how they'd go about setting up a online shopping cart...

The thing that always got me...is every product would be different...requiring a schema change or some fancy techniques to support dynamic fields...

Everything else (shopping carts, etc) seems pretty straight forward...then I suppose the other big challenge would be front-side templating...making your shopping cart *fit* with your existing site layout...

Then maybe payment processors...worldpay, paypal, etc...they all offer well documented API's so whats the big deal? You setup SSL on your server pass purchase credentials to paypal, etc...they call your site if everything goes according to plan and you return a message saying Bad CC or out of stock, etc...

Someone fill me in on what the needs and requirements are from a dummy end user...I don't want the rebuild osCommerce specifications document thank you :P

Cheers :)

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 11:43 pm
by Luke
MrPotatoes wrote:Miva i would never use.
It's what my work has always used... and I hated it at first too, but the more I use it the more I am starting to like it. It takes a while to get used to. It has a lot of restraints, but for people who are strictly designers, it's fantastic.

Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 6:54 am
by MrPotatoes
The Ninja Space Goat wrote:
MrPotatoes wrote:Miva i would never use.
It's what my work has always used... and I hated it at first too, but the more I use it the more I am starting to like it. It takes a while to get used to. It has a lot of restraints, but for people who are strictly designers, it's fantastic.
exactly and i'm not a designer. the problem is that i've been doing data entry and programming. actually that's a lie. data entry is so damned simple and fast that i reward myself by programming. never-the-less, Miva makes it hard to do data entry imo. if anything i would honestly rather use ZeCart and i don't have many awesome things to say about that badboy. i'm not going to list the things but just stay away and find something smaller with an easy populate sort of deal. that's honesly the only reason im' on Zen still