Online store help

leahpmullins

Hi

I have missed a big portion of my college year for due to illness. I have managed to sit my exams and think I have done enough to get through... however I have to abandon my ecommerce project and just do it as a repeat during the summer :-(

I have a big flair for web design and development and am very comfortable with PHP, Javascript, jquery, MySQL etc. so I'm not a complete novice!! However the project requires me to set up an online shop and this is something I know next to nothing about!

I have to implement and document two versions of the store. 1 using Paypal and 1 using Worldpay. My understanding of the difference is that I can set up worldpay instantly without needing to deal with banks or credit card companies but the world pay one involves setting up a merchant account with a bank?? It this correct?


It would be great I could bounce a few questions of some of the more experienced designers and developers here to get started ..

I've been looking at a few tutorials on paypal and that looks like it might be straight forward enough .. One thing I am wondering is, is it possible to set up dummy paypal accounts for testing purposes? i.e. one to be paid into (the store) and one to pay from (the customer) ?

Many thanks in advance. I really appreciate any help you can give me. Hopefully I will be able to return the favour and answer some of your questions too.

Leah

Hoku

leahpmullins wrote: »

I've been looking at a few tutorials on paypal and that looks like it might be straight forward enough .. One thing I am wondering is, is it possible to set up dummy paypal accounts for testing purposes? i.e. one to be paid into (the store) and one to pay from (the customer) ?

PayPal Sandbox does exactly that. You can set up receiving and paying accounts. All you have to do is use the Sandbox API instead of the live PayPal system.

Freddio

leahpmullins wrote: »

My understanding of the difference is that I can set up worldpay instantly without needing to deal with banks or credit card companies but the world pay one involves setting up a merchant account with a bank?? It this correct?

I cant imagine a bank giving a merchant account to a student for a college project. I think the confusion is that you need an Internet merchant ID with some gateways to accept funds into your account (Realex is an example) but what world pay have for accepting funds is an account called a merchant account which again doesn't look suitable for a college project.

Is cash-on-delivery an option? (It comes with most commerce open sources)

TheWaterboy

As another poster said Paypal provide a Sandbox to test and there is no restrictions in setting up an account

Worldpay might be a bit trickier though as they are going to be your merchant bank also so will require some documentation from you so its hard to know will they give an account for a student project.

Both Paypal / Worldpay are pretty easy to implement and there is alot of documentation on the web. It all depends on how 'nice' you want the process. You can simply send your customer to a paypal shopping cart and thats it or you can make it much nicer whereby once they have purchased, your database is updated and they are returned to a thank you page on the site.

leahpmullins

Thanks a mill guys. The PayPal sandbox appears like the best place to start. I am going to get stuck in here and worry about the rest later ;-)

Are there any particular tutorials that you would recommend for coding a store (in PHP) using the paypal sandbox?

shanno06

If you have to code it from scratch then as everyone else said work ahead on PayPal sandbox. If you can use a system already built, use oscommerce and in the Payment options of oscommerce you can change the settings to sandbox if you go down that route.

Regards.