I am looking to start a website for directly sales to the public and I am trying to gather as much information as I can. Since several people here do it. I thought I might post some inquries. I would like to know how some people have gone about doing it? An recommendations? Websites to read, examples? I am particular intrested in how do you do set up the "Payment recieved now you can download" parts. I am sorry if this is a little vague I have bought many things in this fashion but really know nothing about the nuts and bolts of it.
If I will actually go through with it or not I do not know, but it never hurts to understand something.
Thanks

Has anyone here helped out Bobby?

I know there's plenty of tech geeks among us, myself included, but this is one area into which I have never ventured, so I will add my hat to the ring in regards to a request for information on how to go about setting up an automated "you have paid, now you can download what you paid for" shopping cart on a personal website.

Even a link to a site describing the requirements and process would be helpful. Thanks!

You can make buying something from your website really simple or ridiculously complicated.

Using a host-supported e-mail like orders@my-awesome-game.com to accept check or money order payments is a good start. PayPal Buy Now Buttons are (IMO) an easy way to take credit card orders for your stuff.

Then, once you grow to moving 500+ units a month, you can pay outrageous charges to process merchant services from your site, hire a salaried web guru to design a stunning on-line store and have an accountant whose full time job is to move your money around the stock market, making you a million a year; and she'll only cost you $100k, annually. Sweeet:)

O'Reilly's book Web Database Applications With PHP and MySQL uses an online wine store as the example application, and implements a "shopping cart" for it.

It shows how to do minimal credit card validation with the Luhn algorithm (i.e., how to check whether a credit card number is a possible valid number), and mentions sources of code for online credit-card payment validation networks. All of those require subscriptions, though.

Okay: I don't know how you are hosting your site--so this will be somewhat vague. Here is what is probably the *simplest* way to make this work.

There are 2nd-party credit card processors that you can sign up with. They take a small cut of your money and do the merchant-account stuff for you (all the validation and the charge etc.)

One is iBill. There was also ccBill (IIRC--it's been a year). What you did was frame their payment pages or link to them and they'd handle the transaction and post back a string like PAYMENT ACCEPTED: 8.95 USER=Marco PASS=XYZZY.

This would be recieved by your web server and would then display the download page (as well as marking them as a payed customer in your database so that they could come back whenever they wanted).

This requires that you:
a) sign up with them
b) have a database that will recieve customers
c) have error handling in case the charge fails (send them to a 'sorry, that didn't work, please try another card page')
d) have a web-server that can recieve the post and write code that knows what to do with it (this doesn't require anything special actually but you need ASP or PHP or JSP or something to handle the incoming data)

I think I've done a terrible job of explaining this. Let me know if it made any sense.

Here is iBill: http://www.ibill.com/
Here is ccBill: http://www.ccbill.com/general.html

Now--there are *other* ways to do this (you can get a merchant account and interface with Visa directly, for example) but these guys have a pre-packaged solution that's fairly good. It's really made for adult content but you can sell stuff through it without any real difficulty.

-Marco