Joeliver

[formerly Joeliver's Travels] Now a personal "internet travels" blog, so to speak.

Thought this was a great article on online payment processing. I've been wondering for quite some time now! Kudos and many thanks to 37signals for being willing to share their ideas and mentor those interested in learning!

Update: Here are some other articles I've found on the topic.
* FreshBooks Guide to Accepting Payments Online
* Doteasy Guide to Taking Your Business Online

Chris said...: I had to set up a Paypal gateway in Java a few months back. It was... well... painful. This article brushes against the surface of everything that is really involved in this. There is so much security surrounding credit card numbers and such that it's not even funny.

Everything has to be encrypted and triple checked for authenticity. It took me almost a month to get it fully functioning and I'm not even sure I did it right. Testing is also no fun because in order to really test your real live working system... you have to make a real live charge to a real live credit card. Sure, your test system worked with a test credit card with their test system, but by the time you get done flipping all of the switches how can you be sure you flipped all of them, and that you didn't mess anything else up in the process?

I ended up with about 12 charges to a real credit card (at $20 each) during the whole test to live conversion. Very annoying to have to tell your boss that you charged the company credit card for $240 (which most of will be deposited right back into a different company account, minus $.80 a transaction for processing fees) just to launch the site...

But who knows, maybe I was doing it all wrong. I had no one to look at my code/process to tell me...; 2:33 PM
Joeliver said...: Wow that's a pain! I knew I was always apprehensive for a reason, but that's just nuts. Thanks for sharing Chris.; 2:47 PM