Need some advice please...

[Ogre]

I have a new client that owns a music shop. They mainly sell CD's and DVD's and for their website, they want to showcase approximately their top 100 CD and DVDs. I think I will be using osCommerce for my cart but I need suggestions for a payment gateway. They already have a credit card terminal at their store. Can I just setup the cart software to email them when an order comes through and they could manually put in the credit card information?

I would like to keep their cost down as low as possible to begin with. I would like to avoid them needing to setup an Authorize.net account as well. Preferably they could just use their existing terminal.

I'm pretty new at this so any suggestions would be very appreciated. Thanks!

Mike D.

[stevel]

Yes, absolutely you can have osCommerce just accept the credit card info and relay it to the client for offline processing. This is a standard and free feature of osCommerce.

The default is that the whole credit card info is stored in the database and the client checks the admin panel to retrieve it. I suggest the following custom settings:

- "Send Split Credit Card Emails" - If you enable this, the middle 8 digits of the credit card number are sent to you in an e-mail along with the order number, and nothing else. The database has the credit card number with the middle 8 digits removed. The advantage of this is security in that the whole number is not in any one place.

- "Send Extra Order Emails" - this is the feature almost everyone is looking for but doesn't recognize. Fill this in to get a copy of the order acknowledgement as sent to the customer. Otherwise, you have to check the admin for new orders.

I also recommend a "Delete Credit Card Number" contribution. After the order is processed, you check a box to cause the CC info to be removed from the database. This is for security, in case someone manages to break in to your database.

[Ogre]

Thanks Stevel for that thorough and insightful reply. It really answered my question and your input will help me cover my basis during implementation.

Now that I have my main question answered, may I ask how well osCommerce works for an ever changing merchandise catalog? As mentioned, the catalog will likely consist of only 200-250 items. These items are subject to change as often as weekly. I have used Mals before and that worked pretty well but it was only for 4-5 static items. I only ask because I have yet to use osCommerce and from reading this forum today, I am getting the impression that there is a steep learning curve.

So, in a nutshell... Is osCommerce user friendly and do you think it would be a good solution for my situation? Thanks again, your response has answered alot already.

Mike D.

[stevel]

Customizing osCommerce can be difficult, but once you have it going, it's fine. Adding, changing and removing items is done through a web administration panel. There are many user-written add-ons (contributiions) that can assist with dealing with large numbers of items, such as loading from an Excel spreadsheet.

For the customer, it's as friendly as any other shopping cart system - more so than many.