Web Development with PHP and MySQL

Aside from basic PayPal based websites, I generally decline to become involved with eCommerce for reasons stemming from the potential legal liability and overall cost effectiveness.

From a development standpoint, if you were to begin writing eCommerce code from scratch and continued daily for a year or two, you might succeed in creating a highly useful eCommerce application. There are a LOT of things that can't be achieved easily with online programming, but which are easy to achieve in desktop programming. In other words, it's really complex if the application is going to be flexible while meeting the needs of most businesses. The back-end of a good eCommerce solution should approximately resemble QuickBooks™ in that there should be an item list with inventory and sales tax configuration, a means to create and subsequently modify invoices and customer statements, shipping modules, financial reporting, cash receipts, etc., not to mention validation of user input for all data fields in dozens of database tables in order to ensure data integrity.

Delivering a custom eCommerce solution to the client is almost always outside of the client's budgetary constraint. If it's not outside the client's budgetary constraint, then the company is usually large enough to already maintain an I.T. department that includes programmers having the skills to create a secure eCommerce website.

With custom eCommerce solutions generally ruled out due to budgetary constraint, most eCommerce website owners end up with one of the popular Open Source shopping cart solutions, or a derivative thereof. In this event, you can rest assured that every serious hacker on the planet knows the foibles of the selected application, and will begin exploiting them, one by one, once the new website is located. This in turn creates the need to hire someone to periodically review the webserver's request logs, often daily, but possibly hourly in the case of a busy site, adding significantly to the maintenance cost.

Regardless of whether your shopping cart is a custom web application or an Open Source application, the server administrator (or possibly an employee of the web hosting company and/or data center housing the server) can potentially extract information from the server's database. Don't let yourself be fooled into thinking that an SSL certificate does anything more than encrypt data being submitted by the user. After the user's data is collected, website owners need to determine the identities of the I.T. people who could potentially access credit card numbers or potentially steal the identity of thousands of buyers. Chances are pretty good that even if the stored data is encrypted, the thief will be able to determine the method of encryption and easily decrypt the data.

This in turn raises the question of whether or not the server should be maintained in-house at significant cost, or if an expensive dedicated server can be locked down securely in a remote data center. Either way, the average would-be eCommerce seller just saw their maintenance cost rise significantly.

Thus, there are significant potential insurance liabilities and significant potential legal liabilities associated with the development, hosting, and, daily operation of an eCommerce website. Given this, it would be prudent to have an attorney and an insurance agent work together in selecting a brick-and-mortar web developer specializing in eCommerce, and who currently maintains a business general liability insurance policy, has been in business for several years, and who will sign a binding contract personally guaranteeing the security of the website data, and protect the site's owner from potential liabilities.

Most website owners don't go to this extreme. Most get lucky and encounter minimal problems with eCommerce, while a few of them end up getting sued or hacked, and end up spending 10 times more money fixing situations than what it would have cost them in the beginning to contract with someone who will personally guarantee the operation.

I suggest looking at either CS-cart or NolaPro. Buyers would do well to purchase both hosting and ongoing support for either product directly from the authors.

e-junkie.com supports the sale of digital goods or physical goods.

Credit Card Fraud: How Big Is The Problem?

Online Fraud Cost Merchants $4 Billion in 2008

Cardholder Information Security Program

Six reasons NOT to try to be an online retailer

E-Commerce Fears? Good Reasons

11 charged in connection with credit card fraud

Authorize.net - Certified Hosting Directory

www.payvment.com

Web Developer Resume

See also phpvs.com.