A Massive Change Of Plan

Things have got a little bit dodgy now and I think I'm going to have to change the plans. I'm getting a little bit scared due to the complexities of developing my own checkout system from scratch.

You have to understand that there are two halves to an e-commerce system. First of all, you have the actual checkout itself: This includes the methods for allowing the visitor to compile a list of products they want to buy, and then calculate a final price. That is stage one.

THEN you have stage two - the payment processing. This is the bit when you get the customers card details and actually charge their bank account. This is the bit that scares me and this is the bit that I think it going to cost me. If I go for a fully 'from scratch' e-commerce system, as planned, I'm going to have to find some way of handling the payment processing. I don't know whether that involves having some kind of agreement with the banks or what.

As far as I know, if you own a physical business, such as a corner shop, if you want to take credit card payments you have to have some kind of agreement with an external payment processing company. You take the customer's card, they enter their PIN for verification, the transaction details are sent via a telephone line to a payment processing company (the banks probably offer this as a business service), that processing company must then sort out the transfer with the customer's bank, then 'ok' the transaction and send confirmation to the shopkeeper that it was a success. (Phew, that took some typing).

With my proposed online system, the customer will use my custom-built shopping cart system to create an order (a list of products they wish to buy) and calculate the amount due. That is where 'I get off', that's the end of my involvement. I then must have the ability to send the 'amount due' information along with the customer's card details to the external payment processor. Damn, I can't believe I never took that into consideration.

The first thing that I'm thinking of now, is that must be another advantage to using Google checkout - Google has the capability to take part of the payment processing. It's a massive organisation that must have the bank-end all sorted.

This means that, at least for now, I would be stupid not to use Google Checkout or something very similar, in my project. If I create the system up to the point when the transaction is ready to be paid for, I will then hand the transaction over to Google, or whoever, for the actual payment processing.

My next task is to explore Google Checkout and it's rivals, analyse their pros and cons against each other and see how they integrate into a pre-built website. I'm sure there will be a whole host of limitations that will effect the project, but I'm very optimistic now that I have an idea of where we are going.

Peace. Out
Phil