E-Commerce

[rovshan]

Hi,

I have a task to write an e-commerce site. But I have never did it before, so I need some information on how it works. I visited a lot of sites offering merchant accounts etc and got messed up :-). Some of these sites offer their own forms to collect payments and some let you create your own. And then they send you an e-mail that the payment was made. Now assume that 3 customers made a payment. They don't have my db of registered users. How do I figure out from e-mail who bought what?
I'm sorry if my questions are silly, but I'm new to this work and I need to collect a lot of information before starting. Please, help me with my questions or suggest some good resources to read.

Thanks,
Rovshan

[rdoekes]

How do I figure out from e-mail who bought what?
as long as email is a unique characteristic of your customer database and you store per order the total amount, you can very easy match that. Even better if the orderID is included in the feed from the third-party, then matching is even easier.

[Ribeyed]

HI,
are you trying to build your own custom ecommerce shop are you looking to incorporate a thid party ecommerce shop into your site?

[rovshan]

No, I don't want to incorporate third party products. I have found some good resources for newbies in this work at webmonkey.com and now reading them. Thanks

[rdoekes]

FYI:
http://forums.webdeveloper.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18553
about security.

[rovshan]

I will not try to reinvent something myself regarding security and use existing technologies embedded into operating system, or distributed by other vendors. Now I'm collecting more information on this topic. What do you think of DPAPI? Is it secure enough?

[Ribeyed]

Hi,
DPAPI fine for Encripting data but its for ASP.NET not sure if its uses in ASP. Are you want to build your own ecommerce shop but connect it to a third party company for real time credit card processing?

[rovshan]

Yes, that's exactly what I need

[Ribeyed]

hi,
so what lavel of ASP are you at? Can you use databases, recordsets and SQL?
Can you pull information from databases and display on screen?
Do you know how to use a global.asa file?

[rovshan]

I've written apps for companies such as BP and Lukoil. I'm MCP in ASP.NET. I have working experience with SQl Server, MS Access, MySQL and PostgreSQL. I know how to work with db-s (effective connection pooling, reducing number of queries etc.), active directory, wmi, xml.net, ado.net, .net remoting etc. But I'm very new to e-commerce.

[Ribeyed]

HI,
Ok great good skills, nice i will help you. Ok better using SQL Server for this. Have you got a database structure i can look at or do you need to develop that as well?

[rovshan]

No, db is not ready yet. I have no problems in designing db in general. I'm only interested in that part that's associated with storing credit card information. I don't know how it works. For example after the user fills in our form with his personal information and credit card details and presses Submit button. What happens next? I write his personal details (including encrypting important data) to db. But how do I verify his credit card number and process transaction? Do I need some special components (COM or .NET) provided by company offering merchnat account to accomplish this? Do I get immediate reponse on the success or failure of transaction, or do I need to wait for a confirmation e-mail? Could you please, explain me what happens after the user presses submit button in steps? That would be very very helpful to me. Thank you very much for helping me.

[Ribeyed]

Hi,
rovshan, i think i can answer all your queries here. 2 ways you can handle this real-time and not real-time. We have discussed non-real-time and the implications of storing credit card details yourself in another post recently. Real-time is the way to do it, so i would suggest you start looking at some of the companies that provide real-time transactions for ecommerce, such as WorldPay. I use WorldPay for my clients, personally i think their service is second to none but thats my own opinion. Anyway when you register with worldPay they set up a secured page on their server. Using post from your last page where the customer clicks proceed to payment page or something like that, you send the transaction total, your unique number give to you by world pay, your shopping cart ID and any other variables you want to receive back from WorldPay. So the page worldPay give you takes name, address, country, telphone number, fax number and credit card details. When the ucstomer submits this form WorldPay verify this real-time. Like you mentioned in your post a simple yes or no for transaction sucessful is returned. You have the option in your WorldPay admin to fully customize this payment page. Everything can then be sent back to your site, to a page you specify in the admin. Thanks everything apart from the customers credit card number. Now you might say but how do i check the number, well WorldPay have a full transaction payment order console where you can retrieve all the data you will need. However you still get the result of the transaction, the name, address, orderID and any other values you sent from your form sent back to your web site for you to act accordingly.
WorldPay also provide full technical details on how to set this up, believe me its very easy you should have any problems with this at all.

[Ribeyed]

if you want to see this in action have a look herehttp://www.discoverycomputing.com/shop/shop_searchby_categories_new.asp

This is one of mine, it is in test mode at the moment. Go ahead and purchase something use credit card number 4000000000000002 and security code 123 and expired date within 5 years. Whatch the URL as it moves from discovery computing to worldpay when you click "proceed to checkout"

[rovshan]

Thank you very much. Really very helpful. I will now go to WorldPay site and read their instructions as you told. Again thank you very much.