E-Commerce - Easy Question. ;) Jk

I have to come up with the easiest method of ecommerce for a website to take credit card purchases. I know there is paypal but this is for a clients program I wrote last year. I can not display a "Paypal" logo or other things that will make it look cheesy. I need secure transactions etc.

What are the best and cheapest options I have to look into and any sample code to go along with each?

TIA

rob, how cheap does it need to be?

I currently use verisign's payflowpro dll to do CC transactions and it works really well, and is totally seemless. It is however in the realm of 1000-1200 per year.

once you have the license, you can use it ANYWHERE. windows apps, web apps, you basically pay for the service to do the transactions not for the dll

The code is no more than a few lines though

also paypal has an API... not sure about if you need to put the logo or not, but its possible you could use paypal via their APIs to do processing.. of course paypal takes a chunk of everything

That sounds great except for the cost :( Unless they want to add a charge per transaction to cover the yearly license. Hmm. Are there other methods somewhere in the cost of haf of that one or less?

Can you post a small example of payflowpro code?

Thanks

they have another thing called just payflow or maybe payflow "something" other than pro that is cheaper, but not as seemelss (ie it takes you to another site to do the trans, and returns the result to you)

anyway here is a CC processing routine from one of my windows apps... some of the vairables are not defined because this sub is actually part of a class i wrote to do the transactions, so some variables are defined outside the scope of the sub... but you can see its pretty simple

note that the pfpro variable is of type PayFlowPro.PFPro, which is a .NET wrapper class they give you for .net apps, it hooks into the COM dll to make it very easy to write this stuff in .NET... no need for DLL imports or anything

VB Code:

Public Sub ProcessCard()
 
        Dim pfpro As New PayFlowPro.PFPro
        Dim sResponse As String
        Dim pCtlx As Integer
 
        Dim User As String
        Dim Vendor As String
        Dim Partner As String
        Dim Password As String
 
        Dim HostAddress As String
        Dim HostPort As Integer
        Dim ParmList As String
        Dim Timeout As Integer
 
        Dim UserAuth As String
 
        User = "USERIDHERE"
        Vendor = "VENDORHERE"
        Partner = "verisign"
        Password = "PASSWORDHERE"
 
        If mTesting Then
            HostAddress = "test-payflow.verisign.com"
        Else
            HostAddress = "payflow.verisign.com"
        End If
        HostPort = 443
        ParmList = "&TRXTYPE=S&TENDER=C&ACCT=THECARDNUMBER&EXPDATE=THEEXPDATE&AMT=THEAMOUNT&COMMENT1=THECOMMENT"
 
        'INSERT OUR VALUES
        ParmList = ParmList.Replace("THECARDNUMBER", mCCNumber)
        ParmList = ParmList.Replace("THEEXPDATE", mExpDate)
        ParmList = ParmList.Replace("THEAMOUNT", mAmount)
        ParmList = ParmList.Replace("THECOMMENT", mComment)
 
        Timeout = 30
 
        UserAuth = "USER=" + User + "&VENDOR=" + Vendor + "&PARTNER=" + Partner + "&PWD=" + Password
 
        ParmList = UserAuth + ParmList
 
        pCtlx = pfpro.CreateContext(HostAddress, HostPort, Timeout, "", 0, "", "")
 
        sResponse = pfpro.SubmitTransaction(pCtlx, ParmList)
 
        mResponse = New ArrayList(sResponse.Split("&"c))
 
        pfpro.DestroyContext(pCtlx)
 
        pfpro = Nothing
    End Sub

So mResponse holds the return authorization id, transaction id, etc. Looks straight forward. Only thing is that they will only be doing low volume of transactions and the product is parking permits at a cost of $2.00 a night. For the non-pro version to take you to another site may be acceptable if its cheap enough and easy enough to implement.

I think a search over at verisign is needed to see the details on the non-pro version.

Thanks so far for the help. Anything other options out there? I saw that thread in VB.NET on the paypal apis but it looks like it also involves CGI scripting. What do you think of it?

yeah mresponse holds all the info you need. The PDF you can get from verisign has a whole list of the possible return codes and what they mean, they also give you a test area with test data to use to get it working right. It is a little on the expensive side, but it has worked 100% for us everytime and we have it in a windows app, an asp app, and an asp.net app.

are people going to put 2 bucks on their credit card??

I have never really touched the paypal stuff.. I only know it exists from one day I went looking at the ebay API stuff...

What is probably going to happen is that they will purchase multiple nights. The only other way to get a permit is to drive over to the police station and use a kiosk system paying with cash.

well just keep in mind that credit card transactions also cost PER transaction.. this isn't a cost that you pay to verisign, but its a cost that is payed to the actual PROCESSOR of the cards. we use merchantesolutions

this is the case with all CC processing as far as I know, even before we did it the WEB way and had the swipe machine here that dialed in, we payed per transaction.

verisign is simply the gateway between the merchant processor and yourself.

so i guess its a pretty complicated system, but as far as implementing it, its very simple from a programming standpoint... maybe that is why we pay so much for it here :)