website e-commerce and such

fightinfilipino

can anyone recommend a good book or resource that can walk me through setting up a storefront on a website, and what i'm going to need?

i've been asked to help rebuild a student organization website. the organization has about two or three major events per year (parties, really), where they've sold tickets online using a Paypal payment system. i need to understand what's required to set something like that up (do i need to get an SSL certificate, can we just link to Paypal, how would i set up the web pages for this on the student org site, that sort of thing).

can anyone familiar with this stuff point me in the right direction?

fightinfilipino

bump?

WhatToThink

I havent ever done an e-commerce site before but check out this series from nettuts.

mspencer

I can help you understand the payment processing side of things, but I'm biased since I work for a payment processor.

Predictably I think the business details of payment processing are one of the easiest things for people to overlook. The short of it is: when a payment processor runs your transactions and pays you for them, they are taking a risk on you. If any of your sales are reversed, they can try to get the money back from you, but they might not be able to. If they can't reclaim that disputed money from you, they're stuck taking a loss 200x to 300x greater than the profit they would have normally made.

So it's important to be able to demonstrate that you're an established business, with a credit history that suggests you can absorb a few of your sales suddenly being charged back without your business imploding.

Failing to understand that, thinking payment processing is some banking service like any other, leads to lots of problems.

Beyond that there's the routine technical things that other people in this thread can help you with.

Tejs

If you are just implementing PayPal, then it can be as simple as implementing your side of the PayPal API and creating a merchant account with PayPal. Once you do that, you should have access to the developer section of PayPal and all the API documentation you will need.

I'm also fairly sure there are prebuilt solutions out there for whatever platform you are running on, but if not, implementing their API is fairly easy, especially if you will not be setting up recurring transactions.

fightinfilipino

so i shouldn't need to purchase an SSL certificate if i'm going through something like Paypal, right?

Tejs

I'd imagine you would want one to reassure users that your site is secure for accepting payments, but ultimately that decision will be up to you and whatever solution you implement.

soxbox

If you're doing off site payment processing and there's no login on your actual site, there's no need for ssl. With many off site payment processors, you can actually build your entire site in static html.

Jimmy King

In most cases, no, if you are using Paypal or any other 3rd party processor like that you do not need SSL. There are occasionally reasons to want it even though you don't actually need it, though. The primary reason that comes to mind (which is the situation with my own employer) is that you are creating the actual input form yourself and hosting it on your site so that it keeps your look and feel, etc. The form itself will actually submit via https to paypal or whoever and so is perfectly secure. The entry form will not be on an https page, though, and while it does not actually need to be you may lose customers due to them thinking it is insecure since there's no locked padlock or colored url entry bar.