Credit Cards....

[Scriptage]

Anybody know how to do credit card transactions with CGI?

Do you have to get a bank to provide the backbone to the program?

Regards

Carl

[SilasMarner]

There's not really a simple answer to this, so: "it depends." :)

The general model is that a CGI script takes the data for the transaction from the user, and uses a secure interface to "post" that data to the merchant processor (e.g. Verisign, Authorize.NET, etc) server, getting a result code back (success or reason for failure). The merchant service then takes care of reconciling the transaction, depositing it to the bank account, etc.

Some merchant processor services can provide you with Perl code to start from. Others, of course, have their own web interfaces that you can shuffle the user off to, but this is obviously much less customizable.

The place to start is probably asking what credit card processing provider you're going to use, and then askign them what options they provide for custom software to talk to their system.

Hope this helps,
Chris

[sparq]

http://www.cgi-resources.com/

There are a bunch of scripts there that are built to handle credit card transactions among other things.

[Scriptage]

Cheers Chris, thats a big help... looks like I'm going to have my work cut out for me... especially since it's going to be custom coded... looks like im going shopping for a credit card processing provider then.

Thanks again

Regards

Carl