Script-Based Credit Card Interfaces (
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To meet the demand for greater, more flexible access to real-time
electronic transaction processing, transaction processing providers
are lowering the barriers of entry, and opening the interfaces to
their systems, allowing developers an opportunity to create custom
interfaces for electronic commerce systems. In this article we show how
easy it can be to connect your website to these systems and add
real-time credit card processing to your programming arsenal.Conducting real-time electronic commerce over the internet is clearly a
requirement for any serious internet store, but these days it seems that smaller
and smaller ventures seem to have a desire to tap into this new world of
potential revenue. One option for these small businesses is to use one of many
pre-packaged internet storefront products available from a variety of commerce
providers, software developers, and consultants. However, these solutions
typically offer limited customization and may have hefty setup and transaction
fees. If you’re like me, and you need a tightly visually integrated solution,
and you’d rather build than buy, then these solutions aren’t for you.
To
meet this demand for greater, more flexible access to real-time electronic
transaction processing, transaction processing providers are lowering the
barriers of entry, and opening the interfaces to their systems, allowing
developers an opportunity to create custom interfaces for electronic commerce
systems. Providers, such as CyberCash and Authorize.net, will typically offer a
number of different methods of interacting with their authorization systems,
putting a remarkable amount of power and flexibility in the hands the savvy
developer.
In this article, I will show how easy it can be to connect
your website to these systems and add real-time credit card processing to your
programming arsenal.
Before going into the specifics of picking a
provider, providing appropriate security, and exchanging information from the
service provider, we should first understand what steps are being taken in a
typical electronic commerce transaction, and how those steps occur.
1.
You establish secure connection with the user
2. You collect transaction
information from the user (cc info, as well as name / address, etc.)
3. You
send the user’s information to the commerce provider
4. Commerce provider
sends information to credit card processing network for verification
5.
Commerce provider receives authorization (or denial) information from
network
6. Commerce provider sends result of transaction back to your
site
7. You display the result of the transaction for the user
Please
note that due to space concerns, this article will not cover the construction of
internet shopping carts or the creation of commerce sites from scratch. I assume
that you have the ability to create a transaction and are ready to submit it for
processing. Also, though there are several providers who provider transaction
authorization services, this article will discuss how to build a request /
response interface with the Authorize.net system. Finally, the few snippets of
sample code in this article are done in PHP.
{mospagebreak title=Pick a
Provider} The first thing that you’ll have to do before starting work on your
transaction system is to select the provider who will handle your transactions.
If your development project is for someone other than yourself, the client may
already have made this decision for you. Otherwise, you’ll have the opportunity
to choose for yourself. Two of the most popular providers for this service are
CyberCash and Authorize.net.
CyberCash (
http://www.cybercash.com) was one of the
pioneers of the on-line payment authorization industry and is currently the
leader in this field with over 25,000 merchants using their automated processing
services, according to their website. They offer a wide variety of service
options and interfaces, including the HTML form request / response interface
that we will demonstrate below. For more detailed information about their
product offerings and systems, please see their website.
Authorize.net, founded in 1996, is quickly
building a reputation as a leading provider of internet transaction services.
Like CyberCash, they offer a variety of options for connection with their
verification system, and also provide some excellent tools for integration
testing. They furnish comprehensive documentation for their systems, and a
special testing interface so that you don’t even need to establish an account to
build and test your system.
Though both services are equally viable
solutions for your transaction processing needs, the bulk of this article will
discuss how to build an HTML request / response interface with the Authorize.net
system.
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