e-commerce?

[sweenster]

i'm looking for a guide/tutorial on how to start setting up an e-commerce web site. How hard is it?

I can use PHP / mySQL no problem but i'm not sure about the procedure for authorising payments etc.
(If that makes any sense)

[MotherNatrsSon]

If you can do PHP, you should do a search for "PHP Shopping Cart" and you will come across a couple free ones I'm sure. They will have intallation instruction etc. for the scripts.

As for payment gateways, I use http://www.authorizenet.com/ and they, as well as other payment gateways, have documentation on how to intergrate your site so they can process your transactions.

If I can do it, it can't be that hard. I use perl scripts though.

MNS

[Nightfire]

Another good payment system is http://www.paysystems.com

[i2genius.com]

A shopping cart isn't hard to write. I've actually written a small no-frills one in javaScript that has the advantage that it doesn't have to talk back to the server.

As for payment, again, I took the easy way out. Paypal actually have quite a good programmers interface, where you can post quite a few parameters over about what was bought, customer details etc. Then their system takes care of all the security conscious stuff involving credit card transactions etc.

Their system can even call back your server-side script if you set it up this way.

[oracleguy]

Yeah, I've used the paypal system for setting something up to be bought off a website and I was able to set it up easily enough.

[MotherNatrsSon]

I am curious as to how secure a javascrit shopping cart is. Surrently I have an order form and have been looking at various shoppig carts to find one that is customizable and secure in Perl. Do you have a link to it? or a demo? All payment gateways have to link to your site script via SSL to do secure transactions. The perl script on my sie sends all the info to the payment gateway via SSL and they do all the credit card approval, let the customer know the outcome of the approval and send them back to my site when finished. It all happens about as fastas the customer can click "ok".

MNS