What is happening after I press checkout button?

[FunGuy]

Hi,

I am having difficulties of understanding the online payment logic. Maybe somebody will be able to help me. Let's say I have a cart implemented into my frontend. The cart is connected with my merchant (well this I do not understand fully yet). And I have my backend which is also connected with my cart. So, whenever a user comes, adds some stuff to the cart, gives me his details (credit card number, expiry dates and etc.). After the user press checkout should I connect with my merchant and check for available credit and take the payment right away, or should I somehow store this info as an unfulfilled order in my backend database and after this my employee would charge the user from the backend and only after this fulfill the order. You can see that Im a bit confused with this, so I would appreciate a little explanation or a good link. Thanks a lot in advance!

Regards,

 

[alanc]

It is not common for a small merchant to capture card details themselves. You usually pass the order details and some customer details on to a Payment Service Provider, who handle all the credit-card stuff and pass back a success or failure result. At that point, you know if the order has been paid for or not.

 

[TotallySport]

don't store any card information, you effectivetly post a form to the gateway and the gateway does some processing and sends a response, and your page uses that response to tell the customer the payment has been sucessfull or not. Its all done on one page and in a tiny amount of time.

If you ask your gateway for sample code they normally have test code you can see working with there test servers before you set it up.

 

[Mustaka]

Never ask what happens after you press a submit button. Its magic very similar to how magnets work

 

[shopintegrator]

Your shopping basket software will need to be programmed with the knowledge of how to talk to your chosen payment processor. Each payment processor has its own special way (API = Application Programming Interface) of how to initiate the payment process so the shopping basket software needs to have a connector for each payment processor that it wants to connect with.

Payment processors often have a hosted payment page solution where your shopping basket software may transfer your customer from your website on to the payment processor's website to enter their debit or credit card details, e.g. PayPal, SagePay, eWay etc Your shopping basket is responsible for allowing the shopper to add items to their basket and put an order together but then hands over the shopper with all the order details, shipping costs, tax charges etc. to the payment processors website to complete the payment stage. The payment processor will also have a way of communicating back to your shopping basket software to give it an update as to the outcome of the payment so that it may update the details it stores about the order with the status of the payment for that order, which could in turn trigger any after-order automation, such as automatically delivering purchased digital download files or sending out a completed order invoice pdf to the customer.