hi,
I want to make a small website which can allow users to open account, to shop, and to pay online…
can i know the process or idea when it comes to the credit/ debit card validation and verification…? I came across this keywords over internet - merchant account and Luhn formula - what are they for actually and how to make them…?
In other words, how to do o the credit/ debit card validation and verification which i can protect myself as a seller from fraud and to protect my customers if they provide their card numbers.
what is SSL??
Any reliable books or online tutorials/ references i can count on?
I used shop fitter to build my site.They provide a secure server for no monthly fee and only charge £1 per transaction upto 100 transactions this works great for me as a small buisiness
I use Authorize.net for processing Credit and Debit cards. They have some development and integration guides here: http://developer.authorize.net/ - that may shed some light on the issue.
You might want to consider purchase a book on e-commerce and perhaps PHP shopping carts, etc.
Lau, since you are going to process credit card payments on-line, you will have to open a merchant account and use a payment gateway to process the payments.
Any gateway will check whether the credit card is valid (check number of the credit card, expiration date, etc). As for fraud protection - it is usually included into payment gateway integrations also, they make fraud screening automatically and return the transaction status based on the check result also.
hi thanks for your suggestions. authorize.net seems to be very good. but it seems to cost me - do i need to pay for that so that i can see if it works well with mine site?
One thing to bear in mind, is that if you handle the card numbers at all then you will need to be PCI DSS compliant aat much higher levels than if you don’t see the card numbers (you still need to be PCI DSS compliant, but at a lower level).
For this reason, I’ve been suggesting recently that beginner merchants use a hosted cart solution such as 2Checkout or other similar stores, that way they don’t have to worry so much about security issues.
PayPal is a very good option to start with. All you need is to open an account with Paypal, then you configure that account on your website. Paypal Basic account provides both functionality of both merchant and Gateway. You will also have an option to use express checkout. In this case Paypal will take care of all the account verification and validation. 2Checkout can be another provider that can me considered.
Also note, that if you decide (for some unbeknown reason) to process your payments in-house, then depending on your countries laws you have a legal obligation to dispose of credit card details within a certain time period.