If you have never built an ecommerce site before then you do not want to start building one live for a store to learn on.
There are many facets to an e-commerce store - the least of which is understanding session management, and up to securing your code and servers. It takes more than just PHP to make a good e-commerce site. You are better of starting by looking around for existing e-commerce sites that you can hook into your existing site - ones that are hosted and managed by the service provider such as http://www.dxcart.com The alternative would be to download a shopping cart that you would manage and run off of your own servers, such as http://www.oscommerce.com There are many pros and cons to each of these methods, it is up to you to decide which best suits you, but I would never recommend building an e-commerce shopping cart yourself until you are fully versed in the securing of your servers and code. As for merchant account provision, if you go with an outside supplier for a shopping cart, most integrate with a great many gateway and merchant account providers. They should be able to recommend one that works best with their service. Personally in Canada I prefer PSI Gate (http://www.psigate.com) they are easy to integrate and can provide merchant accounts as well as gateway services. In the US I use Authorize.Net (http://www.authorize.net) - they are a gateway service and can recommend a merchant account provider to get your accounts from. This really is a huge topic that has many different areas that you should understand before you jump into the e-commerce world. Do a search on google to find information about service providers, merchant accounts, gateway services, etc. On 6/25/03 12:57 PM, "Nilaab Y." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I want to start learning about e-commerce, shopping carts, SSL encryption > methods, etc. I have built a catalog system for my clients and I want to > built a fully integrated store on top of it. > > I need a merchant provider that can allow me to integrate the credit card > proccessing within my own designs. I want to just be able to send their > servers the credit card info, for authentication, processing, and banking, > then I want them to send me a confirmation message, saying the credit card > has been authorized successfully and the customer has been billed for such > amount of money, etc. I don't want to use any merchant provider's design. In > other words, no Motiva-like merchant providers. > > Sorry about the long explaination. Here's the question: > > Has anyone worked with a merchant account that can do what I need? Does > anyone have any suggestions of who their favorite merchant providers are? > Are there merchant providers who work better with applications coded in PHP, > or does it really not matter at all which application it's written in? Also, > does anyone know of a website (for dummies) that can teach me how to start > enabling my website into an e-commerce website? > > Thanks in advance guys! :) > -- Cheers Mike Morton **************************************************** * * Tel: 905-465-1263 * Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * **************************************************** "Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple." - Byte Magazine Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Win 98 source code? Eight monkeys, five minutes. -- NullGrey -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
