[Chicago-talk] OT: web store how-to

[Jim Thomason]

> how does one go about accepting CC information and
> handing it off to the
> CC company automatically?

Obviously you want to have that part of your
transaction be secure over SSL for piece of mind for
your buyers. Of course, the CC# needs to be stored and
transmitted securely after that. One past employer had
a client that insisted upon a shopping cart that
accepts the credit card numbers securely and then
emails them to him so he could process them. Very bad.

Anyway, so you always transmit it securely. Also make
sure that it's stored securely on your site. Some sort
of encryption, whatever it is, is better than nothing.
I'll leave the specifics of that as an exercise to the
reader.

As for transmitting it? There are numerous online
services you can sign up with that handle it all for
you (for a fee, of course). You just transmit the info
to them, and they do the niceties like verifying the
card, charging the card, paying you, etc. Paypal has a
service like this, for instance, and a decent API to
speak to it. But not having used any of these
services, I can't speak to which ones would be better
or worse.

I know that there are perl scripts kicking around out
there that do the checksum on the cc# to make sure
it's a valid number. Maybe there's a library at this
point. But you might want to do that before
transmitting to the processing house as well, just to
save a little time doing that data transfer.

-Jim.....

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