[Webpro] alternative to paypal

[Mike S. Krischker]

At 15:10 13.11.2004 -0500, you wrote:
>He has a limited budget.  So, does anyone here have any experience with 
>any open source credit card handling software that I could load on his site?

Hi Joel

With a limited budget, it doesn't work, unless he's willing to approve
and charge credit cards manually. If he's selling coffee, this might be
feasible. In this case, it's a matter of setting up a user-friendly
transaction form with proper email receipts, checking credit card numbers
with the Luhn formula and storing credit cards in a very secure way.

More and more cc transaction services, i. e. the companies which
transfer the charged amounts to your bank account, require that you use
online (not manual) approval/charging systems, which are not thought for
limited budgets. It could happen that in half a year, your customer
receives a letter saying that he has to change to an expensive online
approval service, otherwise his contract would expire.


>Is it necessary to have https to do this properly?  The site has been set 
>up on a shared host account so we would have to move it to get ssl.  I 
>have not experience with this.

SSL is absolutely required. I wouldn't even store cc data on a shared
server. Without experience, and on a 'limited budget', expect many
unpaid hours of work... including finding transaction services, helping
with the contract details etc...

Mike