Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hey All,

I'm going to be using a third party to handle credit card and member subscriptions. I was just wondering, since I'm working with Perl, what would be the best to chooose from? I only tried PayPal and intergrating their validation scripts with your own is not too rough, but I was wondering if there are better ones then PayPal and intergration to be just as good? Any one have any experiences of doing this?

Darion

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: OT: Third Party Credit Card Processors
by hv (Prior) on Aug 12, 2005 at 08:45 UTC

    I have experience of working with WorldPay's "Select Junior" account. That works well, and can be set up to be acceptable secure something like this: configure the WP account to invoke a callback CGI script on your own server on completion, and configure a password for it to supply; when invoked, check that a) you were invoked via https; b) the password has been supplied correctly; then c) look up the order reference supplied, d) check that the currency and amount tally with what you expected, and e) that the transaction was successful.

    I recently started looking at the PayPal offerings, and it looks as if the mechanisms they provide are similar enough to offer the same degree of security for a similar amount of development effort.

    I also looked at another option, the "Protx Form kit". Unfortunately I wasn't able to see a way to use this securely, and when I spoke to their developers they agreed with my analysis of the vulnerabilities, but did not offer any hope that they might be fixed. (The company also offers a "Server kit", but it's Windows only so I didn't evaluate it.)

    Hugo

Re: OT: Third Party Credit Card Processors
by perrin (Chancellor) on Aug 12, 2005 at 14:17 UTC
Re: OT: Third Party Credit Card Processors
by saberworks (Curate) on Aug 12, 2005 at 15:25 UTC
    We had a system that supported both PayPal and Authorize.net (Authorize.net was through Business::OnlinePayment). The Authorize.net stuff was easy to implement, and when their server went down, the scripts would error out correctly. The problem with PayPal was that we would send off a request to their server to charge a card, and their server would never ping back that the card was charged. So people were being charged, but we had no record of it. It was a really bad system and I was happy when we were finally authorized to get rid of the PayPal component.