Forum Moderators: mack
I am trying to get some work done on my site and before I post the job on elance I want to know that the heck I am talking about.
I am setting up a paypal website payments pro account and need to have it integrated on my site. What do I tell people I need done?
I see these places that sell you a shopping cart system, that works with paypal, so all I need is a programmer to set it up?
UPDATE
I will be selling 3-5 digital products, all down-loadable.
A shopping cart is a software implementation of ecommerce by which you select products and prepare to purchase them. It is loosely associated with a display of products and often the two are integrated and synonymous. It can be as simple as a single page with a single product and a "buy now" form that allows you to enter a quantity and select product options, to a product display of thousands of products in which you browse and add items to a shopping cart which "remembers" the chosen items.
The checkout portion of a shopping cart is where many of these services diverge in a myriad of ways. in the simple example above, these often integrate with a payPal account to make a secure payment via credit card or e-Check. The monies are deposited into your payPal account, and from there you deposit them into your bank account.
A more robust and professional method of accepting payments is through a merchant account. You set up an account with a bank that offers online merchant accounts. Your access to this account is through a web-based interface. When a customer goes to finalize the purchase, your website securely connects with the merchant account, which queries the cardholder's account for the purchase and returns a response. If the response is approved, the purchase is authorized and a daily batch auto-deposits today's sales into your business account.
Some of these require a "gateway." A gateway is a bonded service authorized by banks and credit card companies to make secure queries to the cardholder accounts to authorize transfer of funds to your merchant account. Consider it a reliable "go-between" between your merchant account and the cardholder's credit card account.
The advantage of this is it shows you are serious about your business and the visitor never moves away from your site in making a purchase. Many shoppers simply do not like payPal.
In many instances the interaction between the shopping cart, merchant account, and website can be quite complex to automate the process and make it's functioning appear simple. This is where good programmers come in. :-) There are many factors that come into play: the most serious being security for your customers' information, ease of use for both them and you, and budget considerations in implementation.
In your case, a digital product, a visitor would:
1. If it's a single product, simply select the buy now button and move to the payment screen, or if multiple products are available, add the ones they want to a shopping cart which totals the charges and THEN moves to a payment screen.
2. If you use an external payment processor (I.E. payPal,) this payment screen would actually be on the payPal site. If you have your own merchant account, this would be on your site, on a secure page using SSL. This requires the purchase of an SSL cert.
3. When they submit the payment, transaction and error handling occurs: if fields are missing or invalid, an error is returned. If the charge is declined, the customer is informed of this. If the payment is successful . . .
4. In the case of an external payment processor, the customer is returned to your site with some unique "key" or ID that allows them to download your digital product. In the case of your own merchant account, same thing, but they never leave the site. The download location must be some location that cannot be bookmarked or abused, and the true location of your product is not revealed, to prevent a single person from making a purchase and giving it away to everyone free. I'm being a little vague here because you can do this in a number of ways - it all depends on your situation. One good method is making a particular link valid and only valid from one location, identified by a cookie, and after 24 hours the link will not be available.
The obvious next question - depending on your circumstances the costs of implementing all this can range from $200 to $2000, it's hard to tell. Only a comprehensive review of your needs and budget can provide an accurate answer.
I suggest you keep looking, and keep reading, because it's **really** important to understand what you are getting into and know whether someone is blowing you smoke. The only way to know if you've found someone honest is to understand how it all works.
wow.....
thank you. Thanks for taking the time to do this. You have greatly helped me. I have an understand know that I didn't before. I will keep you updated on how I make out, and might ask for your feed back if that is ok.
