Store Advice

I am looking to open a store, something I want to reach a lot of customers. I have been looking at other stores who make use of externally managed checkout systems, and was wondering what other people thought of them? I am personally put off, and feel more comfortable purchasing on the same website. Does anybody have similar thoughts?

I am getting to the point with PHP development where I feel I could make a shopping cart. The only problem is that it’s so very time consuming and they aren’t very flexible. I was wondering if anybody knew of anything, like a checkout system, which could fit around something I developed personally? Am i risking too much if storing credit card details on my server?

If you store credit cards on your server you will need to encode them so they cannot be hacked (I believe that is the law in most of the States, Canada, & UK at least. Also you will need to get a merchant account if you are going to process credit cards yourself. Probably easier to use something like CCBill or one of those to process your transactions.

Have you looked into Yahoo stores or anything like that?