Accepting laser and credit card and being compliant

fifth

Hi,

Someone I know has a wordpress website and would like to start taking payments for various items on the site. They have a business in town and a credit card terminal there but I know this is different.

What do they need, they're going to be with pay zone for their in store terminal and I presume they need a merchant account, ssl cert and to be pci compliant.

This is all a bit out of my depth, I usually help with their website but have never done anything more than setting up a website to accept paypal payments online.

I expect this will be very difficult to achieve.

Trojan

You've mentioned pretty much all the basics there. An ecommerce site is a CMS that manages lots of content, integrates with payment processor, usually has an SSL certificate (depends on payment processing), and has a bunch of CRM integrated to track the customer info.

Regarding PCI compliance, if you don't store the financial info in house, you don't need to be worried about that - that's one way to go if resources are limited.

I'm a big fan of WordPress, it's like a Swiss army knife of CMS's - can do almost anything. However, I don't think it's the best solution for ecommerce (unless you're talking about a handful of products). Look for a specific ecommerce CMS like Magento, Open Cart etc

John_Mc

I agree that Wordpress is only suitable for a limited amount of products. I've used Zen cart in a few projects and it worked out well.

Magento needs a reasonably specced server running it from what I've heard.

Trojan

John_Mc wrote: »

Magento needs a reasonably specced server running it from what I've heard.

Yeah, before getting shared hosting in particular ask if they can run Magento with decent performance - some shared host accounts are specifically designed for running sites that need a lot of resources. If they say "it'll be fine", ask more questions and be sceptical

The other option is go straight for VPS - for a real ecommerce site you should have the budget for that (otherwise run from the project fast as you can).

fifth

They'd prefer to go with wordpress to keep the overall look and feel of the site intact. I could set up an opencart or zencart for them though.

I'm just not clear how to set up their patement gateway for them to accept credit card payments.

Eoin

Maybe look at using a redirection to a payment provider - let them handle all the payments and then redirect the user back to the site afterwards. It really is a load off the mind when you know that you're not storing any of that data.

Realex have plugins for a good few of the open source carts, and you can provide them with a template to use for the payment page. It won't be 100% the same as the site as it can't be used with dynamically generated content - but certainly I would think it's close enough.