Accepting Credit Card Payments

HarvestDesign

New Member
Ok, I've built websites before (successfully) I just haven't built one that accepts credit card payments. I know I have to have an SSL (which will come with my hosting plan). After that what is the best way to go? (in the USA)
- PayPal

- Merchant Account through the clients bank?
- Do I have to use Authorize.net with the merchant account option?
- Does Authroize.net populate the payment page with the correct fields?
- I'm totally out of the loop on this so I need some help.

Thanks!
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
I know I have to have an SSL
No you don't. You only need SSL if YOU are taking credit card details BEFORE passing it to the payment processor. If you are storing CC details you also need to be fully PCI compliant.

If you use a payment gateway where the CC details are taken on the payment processors servers, you don't need anything other than a means of accepting the returning signals for a successful or a failed transaction.
 

Edge

Member
As a first step into e-commerce I'd advise (as above) an online payment gateway to take the credit card details and process them. As soon as customer clicks checkout they go off your site to the white labelled payment gateway page (PayPal etc.). At the end they get returned to a thank you page back on your site.

If you go down the SSL route you'll have to do server config, private keys, and CSR generation amongst other things.
 

Roddy

New Member
As well as PayPal you should "check out" Google Checkout and Authorize.net.

If you are selling software you could have a look at trial pay.com
 
I would recommend paypal for starters, but if you want to have a stand alone payment gateway, look into stripe for online transactions and square for offline cc transactions, both of them are free and doesn't charge a lot of transaction fees.
 

intouch

New Member
PayPal is OK, but if you just want credit card processing Stripe is better in my opinion.
Stripe has lwer fees & doesn't try to push website customers into signing up like PayPal has in the past.
 
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