Can anyone suggest a shopping cart or e-commerce API?
 

It looks like I'm going to be building a website for a health club. The website will need to be able to sign people up online, and I haven't done anything with e-commerce before. I'm pretty proficient in PHP, but the more ready-made the solution is, the less chance of me causing a security hole. I think I want something more along the lines of an API, since most of the code is already written and I could have it integrate with my design more. I don't want something that does everything like osCommerce, because those sort of programs have their own "look" to them.

Does anyone know of a shopping cart or e-commerce API that I could use to do this?

Check out http://www.oscommerce.com/

Re: Can anyone suggest a shopping cart or e-commerce API?
 

Um ... thanks, though.

Travis, did you ever come up with a solution for the health club? I am doing the same research and wanted to know what you came up with.

Thanks,
Troy

I am consideering setting up a blog to sell something. So I have the same needs.
I have not researched the following information personally, but my daughter has changed her website over to PayPal. For years she did the Credit Card validation by hand and entered the CC deposits into here bank account. Now all tht is done by the code furnished by PayPal.

If you want to see how PayPals software works, check
http://www.crystalmountain-aromatics.com

There is an e-mail link if you have question you want to ask her.

HTH
Dave

Actually, I went over to Verisign and one of those "annoying" chat boxes popped up asking me if I needed any help. The guy I talked to was very helpful and explained everything to me. I can't really remember everything he said right now, but he sent me an e-mail were I could try a non-functional demo of the credit card processing system. I haven't used it (the health club thing hasn't worked out yet), but I learned a lot from what he told me.

As I recall, it costs about $500 to get set up with a merchant account. Paypal doesn't have an up-front cost like that, but the paypal fee would catch up with you after you've made about $20,000.

As much as I used to hate those chat boxes, that one saved me a lot of time.

I haven't really looked at the OSC yet, but I wonder if there would be a way to integrate its shopping cart with Verisign or PayPal? I also wonder, are there any shopping cart modules that I could incorporate into my original website. That way I could have a complete custom site with secure payments, plus I wouldn't have to spend much time creating shopping cart functions.