Php/Mysql How do I create a program with php and mysql to handle
credit card payments?

I've been having the hardest time trying to figure out how companies
have this ability to charge to a creditcard automatically.  I want to
create a system where people can charge and pay me money by creditcard
and it automatically deducts from there account, or they pay me by pay
pal and it automatically takes from there account and adds to mine.

I'm willing to add a bonus of $30 if you can find out how to do this
without me paying for a pay service of some sort.  This will be
valuable in creating an online business and to know how to program
something like this.  If the only way possible is through a pay
service, then I'll still give $30 given that you explain how I use
this pay service once I get it to handle payments.

I know the following computer languages... C++,PHP,(very little
MySql),Realbasic.  If I can make a program with realbasic that talks
to this php script and you help explain how, I'll up the value of this
question another $20.

I hope you guys find something.

$10 is just bare minimum if you give me enough information, but really
I'd like good answers, you will be rewarded =).

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Clarification of Question by joepossible-ga on 12 Apr 2005 17:23 PDT

I think I'll clarify what I'm looking for.  I'm not trying to make a
program to steal peoples money, but more like, take for example
googles answers program! You know when you want to post a question,
you enter in your creditcard information and somehow it knows to
automatically charge you that 50 cents assuming you agree to etc and
etc.

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Clarification of Question by joepossible-ga on 12 Apr 2005 17:27 PDT

Well to be more exact, lets say I do have to use a pay service.  Okay
lets assume I have a pay service? now what do I do?  How do I make a
program to use this paid service? (I'm changing the price for this)

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Clarification of Question by joepossible-ga on 12 Apr 2005 17:34 PDT

You see I've done some research myself into this for a longtime, a few
of the sites I've found like to charge $70 just to handle credit
cards! I'm just a kid, I can barely afford to keep my house let alone
pay for this question.  Maybe if someone can find a service
inexpensive enough, or maybe a service that instead of paying monthly
fees just takes money right out of the profits I make, like paypal?
That I would prefer much more so I don't have to worry about going
bankrupt.

Paypal and credit cards are completely seperate... 

In order to accept credit cards, you need to pay someone to process
your transactions with visa, mastercard etc... You can't just "Code"
yourself a way to move money from their account to yours.

What you want is a merchant account or to just use paypal....

The cheapest and the most popular solution is to use Paypal and you
don?t need to write complicated programming.  What will happen is that
Paypal will help you generate a set of html code which u can copy and
paste onto your website.  The procedure is like this.

1. Customer selects purchase option (Paypal)
2. Browser jumps to Paypal Website with Order Information (Order ID, Total, etc?)
3. Customer completes payment process
4. Browser redirect back to your website with Payment Information.

The only programming that you have to do here is on Step 2 and Step 4.
 In Step 2, you need to use PHP to format your Order information so
that when the customer clicks on Pay with Paypal, the required
information is being posted.  In Step 4, you have to capture and save
the information coming back from Paypal for your own record history. 
These include some sort of success/failure message, transaction
number, and so on.

Now with Credit Card, you need to have a registered company and a few
more $$$.  Most of the credit card processing agents charge a setup
fee, transaction fee, and maybe some extra fee for statement or
supports.  But at the same time, they will also provide you with
instruction and programming interface (or module) for you to use on
your website.  What these programming interfaces do is actually
establish a secure socket connection (SSL) and pass over Order
Information to the credit card processing agent?s payment gateway. 
The interface will also provide you with transaction such as Credit
Card Authorization, Settlement, Cancellation, and Refund.

Here is a comparison chart I found that might be useful.  I found
Costco actually to be a good choice.

http://www.infomerchant.net/creditcardprocessing/cc-processors.html

Now, I won?t go into too much detail, in the situation where you do
really have to write your own program interface to establish
connection with your banks payment gateway, maybe because they simply
don?t support PHP,  it is actually not that difficult but you do need
a lot of support from the bank?s tech support.  Here is what you need
to find out before you start programming.

1. What kind of secure connection can you establish with your bank?s
payment gateway?  Most common are SSL Tunnel or HTTPS Post.
2. What are the Communication Protocol and Protocol Definition?  Most
banks use XML and their own set of proprietary Definition.  For
Example;

        <xml>
	<transtype>AUTH</transtype>
	<orderno>123</orderno>
	<total>100.00</total>
        </xml>


Most of the bank won?t provide you with this information directly, the
best way is actually do a reverse engineer on whatever the programming
module they have or check out all their technical documentation they
can provide.

After you obtain all the above information, you need to install OPEN
SSL on your web server to establish secure connection.  You may also
need to recompile your PHP to have OPEN SSL support.
(http://au2.php.net/manual/en/ref.openssl.php)

In short, in your PHP program, what you need to do is format the
Customer?s Order Information to your banks Communication Protocol,
open a secure connection with PHP?s fsocketopen function, send your
order information over with fwrite function, and retrieve the return
information with fgets.

Good luck.

Thanks a lot spiderwu, that actually helps a lot.  I'm going to
research into this paypal thing.  I'll have to find out what commands
I need to send to paypal in specific, as I find them I'll post it here
and see if we can come up with something, in the meantime.

In the future I'll see if I can work with those creditcard systems as
well like that costco thing.  What is your aim or a way to contact
you, mine is x11joex11, I can pay you by paypal if you help me out =).
 What you posted wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for, I was
looking for the actual code, maybe some example page and code that
demonstrates the whole process, but I think I was asking to much for
the price anyways, so I'll reduce my price to $10 for this question
and you can put that as the answer and maybe if I have trouble in the
future I can ask you for help.  I would be willing to pay also for the
advice.  Thanks so much!

If I can't figure out how to do this by myself with paypal, I want to
contact you and I'll pay the other $10-$15 for assistance in finding
the sample code (for both cases), though I'm not very rich and I'm
just a college student maybe I can offer something else to make it
worth the time for you or whom ever helps me as well.

Do this all the time...

In order to process credit cards, you need a few things:

1) A merchant account, preferably one that processes via
Authorize.net.  This will give you the ability to connect to the
credit card system.  Cost to setup: about $200.  Monthly fees not
related to credit card processing $20-40.

2) Highly recommend an SSL certificate so you offer your customers
security.  Most buyers won't pay if they aren't assured of SSL
security.  Cost $150-400 per year.  Most ISP's also charge $25-100 to
place the certificate on the server and provide the required fixed IP
address.

Once those things are in place, there's a fairly simple-to-implement
PHP class available at:

http://www.planet-source-code.com /vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=1679&lngWId=8

Hope that helps.

Hi,
I don't know how far you have come with your project, but I'm
interested in the idea.
The most basic approach that comes to my mind is breaking down the
problem to a few basic obstacles.
The first would be to make your program handle mysql and php. That
would not be a problem, since there are lots of tutorial and help
sites, and even components that  can help you out.
Then you would have to look for a "real" money/payment service that
you can access remotely. Paypal is such a service. They have something
called "IPN", Instant Payment Notification. For webmasters like myself
it is a great way to automate payments online. I use it on my sites
http://www.advertiserspro.com and
http://www.online-copy.com and it took me not even that long to get a
hold of it. Paypal offers developers a range of tools to incorporate
their service into your product.
Once you have an application that can communicate with Paypal, you're
halfway there!
You could even combine browser- and programming techniques to maximize
your system's portability.

Yeah, I've been looking around through the paypal site to try and
figure this out.  They appear to have this cart generation code thing,
and of course the good old donate button, but there has to be someway
to figure out how to make my program know if someone paid me by
paypal, that is my issue now.  I'm intersted myself sadhusystems.  I
see you got a good little site going, I may actually take you up on
your advertising offer maybe if I can get my site working :P.  I
decided I can't afford a credit card company, I'm having enough
trouble affording school.  So I'm going to use paypal.  I can make a
donate button so far easily enough, they had pre-built code, I just
copy and paste where I want it.  In the meantime I'm studying table
creation and connections management to create my own php/mysql shell
to keep track of payments so that when I do figure out how to know if
someone paid me by paypal it puts it in my database for records, or I
get an email and I can ship out there order.

Also I'm not so sure about the legalities of starting an E-business. 
As far as I know I don't need any kind of license.  I live in Southern
California, Orange county, special district (rossmoor).  I did some
research and they said as long as no one comes to my house I don't
need a business license.  Apparently it has to do with traffic.

Anyways, hopefully I can keep this topic alive, thanks for all the
help everyone, It's good to know there is still helpful people out
there, especially for such a complicated task like this (considering I
have no starting point), this is setting in me in the right direction
to where to look.

Since I live in Holland I can't help you with the rules and laws in
your country.. ;'-(
But I have a tip that will speed up your project (if you're still
going with PayPal)
PayPal has IPN (instant Payment Notification) that you can use to
process payments from your customers
How does this work? 
-first you provide an IPN url to paypal and activate INP.
-the url you provide must be able to "read" the IPN post from Paypal,
and return it.
-The moment a customers makes a payment, IPN will POST the payment
details to your IPN url.
-Your "process page" (let's call it "process.php") MUST be able to
accept the POST vars from Paypal, and RETURN them. PayPal makes the
IPN data "bounce" between their site and your "process.php" to make
sure that the IPN data is indeed from Paypal and not from anyone else.
-Your "process.php" returns the IPN vars to Paypal, and then Paypal
reports if the transaction was successfull, who made the payment, the
amount, the currency, transaction id, etc etc.
-You can do anything with these variables!

For example: I have constructed a system that accepts payments,
processes the data, verifies if all is correct, then generates a
unique serial number, stores it in a database, sends it to the payer
and the sysadmin. Payer can the register his program with that serial
number, and during the registration process the serial is marked as
"used". If anyone else tries to use this serial, he'll just get an
email saying "this serial has already been used, yadayada"

Now constructing the "accept-vars-and-bounce-them-to-paypal-and-back"
page is not easy. Fortunately PayPal provides EXAMPLE pages for
php,ASP, java and all major languages! All you have to do is grab an
example page and modify it to atch your system. As far as I know, this
system is safe (as long as you don't build in something that makes it
unsafe ;-)) If someone tries to post an illegal payment to your
"process.php", it will be rejected by the Paypal "bounce" checking,
and you can take action accordingly.

Look for tuto's in your PayPal profile, they are really helpfull!!

Good luck, 
SadhuSystems
http://www.sadhusystems.com

Yeah, thanks a lot actually.  That gives me some more insight into how
this can be done.  I'm going to start experimenting right away.  I
really appreciate the help!!  my email is joe@programinator.com.  I'll
try a little test experiment soon with paypal giving some kind of
serial key when you purchase something and sending it to an
appropriate email and then marking that key as used so it can't be
generated again or used in the program I'm selling. 
http://programinator.com is my site.  I've still got some work to do
fixing it up.