E-commerce, can be simple enough?

MartMax

How do I say this. Basically I'm maintaining a website for a relative. I've mentioned this before here, http://www.nadashop.com. It did not kick off well in term of sales as the company was trying to establish a decent product to sell online. Now we are selling one product ie. holiday vouchers and travel service. We sell in different currency nominations, depending on the region where the buyers from. Price is like €3,000++ per pack. That's valid for a year and a small annual fee applies for the subsequent years.

Is not easy, for one I have no deep knowledge of HTML, PHP or mySQL. We started with osCommerce, in the front the website looked not too bad. Since we are not dealing with much trading items, I decided to go with plain HTML pages, no database and no shopping basket, etc. Plus, the website itself does not require too many pages around.

We now recently have the payment processor provider set-up, a local with instructions that works like PayPal IPN. Simply, I only need to create a HTML form for buyer to fill in and get the credit cards details processed immediately at the payment gateway server. But I think I want more than that!

Now thing that really gets around my head, is to create a simplest way for buyers and us, including to store some data (personal and details), order status and history, etc.

Will I go back to osCommerce which is powerful but I think is too heavy? Again, I definitely must create a payment module that works with the payment gateway.

Or, should I just go simple with HTML forms and light weight database programming?

Or, is there any other solution?

Cheers.

Mart Max

AARRRGH

Hmmm. I'm not sure I understand correctly.

I use 2checkout to process credit card payments. They provide the entire payment system - the forms, the security, etc.

After the transaction is complete, the user gets redirected to a page of mine where I store his details in a database (not his credit card details.)

I find this is the simpleist solution. I'm pretty sure it's the most common as well.

Is this what you're trying to do?

The code to do a couple of MySQL inserts is very straightforwards (I can probably write this for you in a couple of minutes if you want.)

...

Maybe I've misunderstood your question...

MartMax

i'm not sure myself where i am going with this.

maybe sthing like you said, storing his details and his order details on database, so that we and himself can review it in the future. just for a log. and deadly, i think e-mail confirming the payment is also a must.

one thing, how do i create a autogenerated sequential no, coz my payment processor requires merchant transaction id to be created uniquely for every payment? i suppose mySQL is needed for this.

so much things too learn!

AARRRGH

I think in your head you're complicating things.

- You take payment.
- Afterwards store all the information you can (there is no harm in doing this.) It's also simple to have an e-mail sent to you with their information.

I think you might be confused about the unique ID for your payment processor. Surely this is a simple process like your_domain.next_id_from_your_datebase?

MartMax

dublindude

thanks for making my thinking a lot less complicated. i have the unique merchant id, but i also need merchant transaction id created for each payment. i attached the required parameters.

now i am also thinking, what abt an online billing system like the webhosting companies have, you login and pay the invoice they created for you. is there a widely use opensource thingy like this around?

mart

AARRRGH

This seems overly complicated.

When I set up my 2checkout account, the process was simple.

I create the items I sell on 2checkout (in my case, it was hosting plans.)
2checkout automatically create purchase pages for these items
I add links to these purchase pages from my website
User follows link
User is now on the 2checkout page
2checkout handle all the assigning ID's, taking credit card details etc.
Upon payment the user is redirected back to my website
I use this to store his details and send me an e-mail

2checkout create the purchase ID. I already have a merchant ID and my items for sale have item IDs.

I find it very odd that your payment processor wants you to create the transaction ID. Surely you can just use an incrementing number for this this?

For example, you could create a little script that gets the latest transaction ID from your database, adds 1 to it, and then uses that for the transaction. The user would then pay for the service. When he returns back to your website you could update the row (using the transaction ID) to say payment was successful. Rows with a blank "Success" field would obviously be failed transactions (either he just didnt complete payment or maybe the cc company will give you some information like "possible fraud" which you can insert into the database with their IP as well...)

MartMax

dublindude

with your suggestions, i think i'm getting the idea now.... i want to make it easier for buyers to sign up and pay without hassle setting up login, etc.

the idea is like this :
- buyer fills out form giving signing up details.
- sql will store this detail as an order, generate an id.
- buyer gets an e-mail confirming the sign up and instructing payment.
- at payment webpage, buyer gives his name and order id.
- server finds the order in database.
- if success, buyer enters payment gateway.
- payment gateway sends back payment status, update database.
- buyer receives e-mail confirming his payment.

how's that? now, how do i learn scripting and all that in 2 days?

oh gosh...

mneylon

Which processor are you actually using?

If the average transaction is in €3k then paypal's fees would seem to be rather high (unless I'm missing something)

MartMax

this enterprise is based in malaysia. so they get into a local payment processor, transaction fee i wouldn't be sure, around 3% - 5%, very high in comparison with paypal. but i don't have to worry about that. i was only instructed to setup a payment environment as simple as possible.

found phpCoin which has the features that i like, plus save me time to do all scripting from scratch. now i only need to customise the look of it. then, put up a link to my payment processor and ensure all the "POST" and "GET" parameters linked to each other.

infinite_in

The drawback I see with paypal is that the buyer has to have an account with them before a payment can be made secondly most of the users are getting spam from paypal now a days, though I accept Pay Pal is the biggest of the free services and is a good choice for a business with no budget for a payment service provider and resultant they might have much bad press.

I find a local processor might be a good option to go with, like if you are in US 2checkout can be a good alternate option similarly for European countries, chronopay can provide you a good solution.

mneylon

infinite_in - you don't need to have a paypal account to make payment anymore.