Payment Gateways, Secure Servers & Shopping Carts?

[Mike_Reynolds]

I'm a C++ coder who is a newbie to ecommerce with some general questions. I would like to use both PayPal and a payment gateway. In order to learn this I'm helping a friend for free, he has a merchant account with SecureNetShop.com. From what I can tell they do not allow you to have your own website, you have to use there website builder. I tried out snscart.com, which is free, and they have a number of payment gateways they work with, but not SecureNetShop. So I'm assuming that I must get him to drop SecureNetShop (which he is paying for but has never used) and get a merchant account with one of the supported gateways.

I would be much obliged for recommendations on a shopping cart and gateway combination that works well. I'm assuming that shopping carts that submit to a payment gateway have to be on a secure server, is that correct? Or is it possible to have a shopping cart on your own site while only taking the credit card info on the secure server and then somehow combining the info to submit to the payment gateway?

Along those lines I was looking into PayPal's Website Paymet Pro, does that require having your own secure web server?

[buntine]

Along those lines I was looking into PayPal's Website Paymet Pro, does that require having your own secure web server?

I don't think so. Supposedly, all of the transactions are done from their side, which is, of coarse, secured under a 128 bit SSL certificate. You simply need to generate values for hidden form fields and pass them to PayPals engine.

OsCommerce supports PayPal integration, I think. Its Open Source, too. :) http://www.oscommerce.com/about/about

Regards.

[Mike_Reynolds]

Well, I just discovered that SecureNetShop is associated with Autherize.Net and snscart, so scatch that question.

I don't think so. Supposedly, all of the transactions are done from their side, which is, of coarse, secured under a 128 bit SSL certificate. You simply need to generate values for hidden form fields and pass them to PayPals engine.

OsCommerce supports PayPal integration, I think. Its Open Source, too. :) http://www.oscommerce.com/about/about


Yes it is open source, I've been going back and forth between their forum and PayPal's, without being able to figure out what is going on. What is SOAP, for example? And how do you generate a certificate without having a Unix machine, the code is always bundled in tarballs rather than zips? And when I download the API SDKs that are zips for windows they are nothing but PHP or .NET scripts with no HTML code.

I think I could figure out PHP or .NET pretty quickly, if I could just understand what the context is, but I don't know how you get from here to there. Where does that stuff hook into HTML? I could understand it better if it was placed in context showing where the PHP scripts were called from HTML code.

[Mike_Reynolds]

Well, there is HTML in that PHP!

[Mike_Reynolds]

I've been looking at the osCommerce example sites, the new Paymet Pro example someone setup looks just like the main example site at the point I'm stuck at. This is just HTML, but I don't understand it. At the point where the "Add to Cart" button appears, it is horizontally aligned with a "reviews" button in the middle column. Here is the code, and I can clearly see how the link to the reviews page operates, but I don't understand how clicking on button_in_cart.gif takes you to shopping_cart.php?

<td class="main">
<a href="http://www.oscommerce.com/osCommerce22ms2/product_reviews.php?products_id=15">
<img src="includes/languages/english/images/buttons/button_reviews.gif" border="0" alt="Reviews" title=" Reviews " width="100" height="22">
</a>
</td>
<td class="main" align="right"><input type="hidden" name="products_id" value="15">
<input type="image" src="includes/languages/english/images/buttons/button_in_cart.gif" border="0" alt="Add to Cart" title=" Add to Cart " width="120" height="22">
</td>

Now further down in the code there is a reference to shopping_cart.php, but it is a text link at the top of the right hand column. So how does clicking on that button take you anywhere?

The page for the code is:
http://www.oscommerce.com/osCommerce22ms2/product_info.php?products_id=15

[buntine]

The following element:

<input type="image">

is used to display an image instead of the default browser graphic for a submit button on a form. The code you pasted will be enclosed within <form> elements. The contents of the form will be sent to shopping_cart.php when the image is clicked.

Languages like PHP are just embedded straight into the HTML. The two cannot communicate, but PHP is used to generate the markup.

Regards.

[Mike_Reynolds]

"osCommerce can be installed on any server where a web server is running that has been installed with PHP, which includes shared servers, dedicated servers, and locally on the computer you are currently using."

So can you build websites with osCommerce, or is it only for creating webservers and allowing your website to sidestep having to use someone else's secure server for a shopping cart?

Integrating the shopping cart into the website sounds very appealing, but out of my cope at the present if you have to setup your own server to do it. But definitely something I would like to do down the road if this is the case.

I thought from the start that this was server side only, and I found the above quote in the docs which seemed to confirm my suspicion, save for the last part, "locally on the computer you are currently using." I'm still trying to understand what this is, it sounds like it is a God send that I'll come back to someday, but not what I'm looking for right now to get myself bootstraped into web development. Setting up servers is a little ambitious (financially) for me at the moment. I just want to get an example site done and get started developing websites for my local business community (vendors at the Farmers' Markets I work at, and will soon be running one of my own).

[buntine]

"locally on your computer" refers to you setting up your own mahcine as a server. I run a Web Server and PHP on my machine, so I could run OsCommerce. It would still be "server-side", though.

OsCommerce is simply a peice of ecommerce software written in PHP. It is not used to build servers or anything of that nature. You will still need a secure server, OsCommerce only provides the front-end and underlying framework.

Regards.

[Mike_Reynolds]

[QUOTE=buntine]
It is not used to build servers or anything of that nature.
[/QUOTE
Now that much I know! :)

[QUOTE=buntine]
You will still need a secure server...
[/QUOTE
So if you have a cert for an SSL encryption, would that make your server secured? Or is that an external secure server in addition to your server?

You are an extremely helpful person! Thank you very much! :)

[Mike_Reynolds]

(Ugh, I'll preview my posts next time...)

[buntine]

If you get a SSL certificate on your server, data sent from (and to?) your pages will be encrypted and therefore, somewhat secure. I say "somewhat" because nothing is completely crackerproof.

You may want to go through a third-party merchant (PayPal, BPay, etc), who will handle all transactions.

Regards.