SSL, and my first ecommerce site.

[GoodMoJo]

Okay I'm in the proccess over making my first ecommerce site. There's alot to be learned. I think I've finally learned enough to post a question without sounding like an ass. Lets find out.

Right down to it. The client I'm working for already has a merchant account with Athorize.net. So preferably i'd like to stick with them.
Now if everything goes the way I invision it all the customer information would be gathered on my site and then would be sent off to authorize then if the transfer is successful it would add the customer information into the database.

I've read through the authorize.net SIM and AIM manuals, and they say that to do it that way I'll need a SSL. The site is hosted on cihost and they support SSL as far as I know. But when I tried connecting to [mydomain.com...] it said my certificate has is expired or is not yet valid and that my certificate does not match the name of the site. Not exactly the message I want potential customers to see. So my battery questions would be how do I go about getting one of these certificates? Do I have to pay for one? How Much? Would my hosting company give me a free one?

Next i've seen several examples of how to send info to the authorize.net dll using asp. Is there any place i can score the php eqivilent? I don't deal alot with asp, hash variable just an array?

Thanks in Advance,
-Chris

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld GoodMoJo,

>> how do I go about getting one of these certificates? Do I have to pay for one? How Much? Would my hosting company give me a free one?

There are a variety of places to get one and as many advocates for the different vendors. I personally believe in buying from well known names (like Verisign/Thawte) - but that's me. Your hosting company may have what we call a "shared SSL" that you can use. The downfall here is that the URL of the secured pages will show their name instead of yours. Cost of a cert is all over the place but generally no more than $200 the last time I checked 6 months ago.

>> Is there any place i can score the php eqivilent?

For a fee based solution (and I haven't tried them) you could look into authnetscripts.

For freebies check hotscripts or one of the other free script sites. I think you'll need to be specific about which product (AIM or?) you want to use but I did see several scripts out there including some cURL functions.