At my current job I was recently assigned the task of creating a shopping cart and auction system to sell furniture and antiques online. After getting most of the legwork done it was decided that customers would have to pay by credit card online. This brings up a load of questions and requirements of course such as SSL certificates, Real Time processings vs. simple verification, which cards do we want to accept from customers etc. etc. After a meeting or two it was decided that customers would enter a credit card number that would be verified with our online shopping cart, but they would be charged locally at a terminal when the item was actually shipped. After all it’s illegal to charge a credit card for something that has not been shipped. I recommend checking out the laws in your state before jumping headfirst into e-commerce.
I began the endless search on the net for a simple credit card verification class written in PHP and found several that were were very helpful and descriptive, but they generally required lots of modification. Generally, a quick Google search turns up exactly what I want, but low and behold there was no such script. I used what I could find on the net and combined them into my own little script.
A little disclaimer: This is not the actual script we ended up using, but it gives you a good head start on being able to verify credit card numbers through an online form. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND using test numbers and not real numbers when testing your scripts out. DO NOT USE THIS SCRIPT unless you are behind an SSL encrypted https connection, or unless you know what you are doing. That being said…….
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