Whats the best way to offer credit card payment on your website?

Question

I want to offer credit card payment on my website and was wondering whats the best (or prefered) way to do so?

I know I could use Google checkout, paypal, etc. but this is not what i am looking for. I am looking for a simple basic CC payment which supports all the different credit cards only.

Answer 1

There are a lot of solutions out there. A couple to start with: Authorize.net and Payment Tech

Answer 2

If you don't want to use an external processor, this is hard. The security issues are huge, and I can't seriously imagine a bank allowing you to do it. I would strongly recommend you use Paypal, Google Checkout or WorldPay, or whatever payment processing system is provided/recommended by your bank.

Answer 3

There's absolutely no reason you need to deal with storing credit card data on your servers if all you want to do is accept credit cards. Lots of folks that have never implemented a non Paypal/Google Checkout system will try to scare you with talk of it being a terribly huge task, but your code just needs to take an encrypted CC from the client and pass it to the gateway. It never needs to live in your DB and your risk is minimized because of it.

I'd say the line between using Paypal buttons and using a gateway is simply a choice of if you want the customer to check out on your site or on someone else's. That's it. It's not that much more risk, since all you need to do is buy an SSL cert and use a reputable cart system like Magento, Ubercart for Drupal, etc. There will always be effort involved.

Answer 4

I'd rummage around on Visa for the answer, digging up a reliable third party company; I would not by any means write my own CC authorization code; to my mind, that sounds like a great big invite to hackers.

Paypay is reasonably reliable, I know that.

Check out Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, etc., for their solutions. They might license out their shopping cart software(for a fee, of course).