Forum Moderators: phranque
And what about VeriSign?
Thanks in advance!
Shopping cart software is too much of a open statement, if you are selling a product or a service you need a way to extract money from your customer.
how many services are you offering?
what server base are you running asp php perl etc?
I'll see what advice i can offer
dave
In respect to the rest of your questions we need a few more specifics. In addition to what Dave asked -
How may transactions per month are you anticipating?
Are there recurring charges?
Also, since I brought it up, is there any reason to not use paypal? Seems like they have all the tools I need -- subscriptions, too.
-what server base are you running asp php perl etc?
So far we're running on PHP/mySQL, but if necesary we can take some ASP/Perl/whatever.
-How many transactions per month are you anticipating?
We hope to have thousands. Maybe not +10k, but we want it all!
-Are there recurring charges?
(not sure of what you meant, sorry!)
We just find the right fellas to satisfy our end-users, and charge a fee for that. And we want to charge different fees...
TIA!
Since the www has shown up, credit card companies have had to go through a LOT of changes with how they do business. Ultimately, they gave way to allowing middle-men to process the payments. Now there are any number of these middle-men who provide the gateway service for wee folk such as you and me to accept credit card transactions online. For us wee-folk, it is a fabulous development.
These gateway services do a great job of what we ultimately want: see the money, be the money, get the money. And most of them offer you the opportunity to directly use their merchant systems to enable a customer to place an order using a credit card. But they are not real good at that part. Their interfaces are a little clumsy and not as configurable as you might like.
Enter yet another player into the game: The Shopping Cart. The Shopping Cart is smart enough to pass the details of the visitor's transactions along to the behemoth and also smart enough to allow you to make the "cart experience" pretty and nice. They fill a gap in the user experience.
If the "Shopping Cart" is free, they may just take your orders and not pass on the processing to the behemoth. To actually process the money transaction, you take the collected info, log on to your Gateway Processor, enter the details collected by the "Shopping Cart" and get your money. You can do that but it is a lot of hand work. OK in the very beginning.
But the "Shopping Cart" will also offer you, for a fee, the opportunity to upgrade, at which point they will be a pretty Shopping Cart for you AND pass along the full details to the Gateway to get you your money.
So it's a bit of a pass-along game. After two or three years now of using a real baby system of collecting cc info, I'm now just four days into moving to the described here system, I'm really happy with what I've done.
If you are itsy bitsy right now, the whole SSL certification from VeriSign should be off your map. By using these middle-men, they absorb the secure relationship and more power to 'em.
If I could bottom line it for you after all this blowhard stuff, you will have to learn two new technologies: the Gateway stuff and the Shopping Cart stuff (OK I lied, three) and the blending of the two.
I was so intimidated by the thought of the learning process, it took me two years to approach it. There is so much smoke and mirrors out there. But in the last week, now that "I get it", I'm thrilled.
I won't name names here, of course, but if you want to know which services I've chosen for this process, you can sticky me.
Hope this helps.
