I’ve been working on a few different projects, one of which is a new site to handle digital sales for some products that I’ve been developing. I was originally thinking of just using PayPal as the payment method on the site but I’ve grown to realize over time that… well… PayPal can really be douchebags when they feel like it and when they do their isn’t much of anything you can do about it. So instead I’m planning to offer a single ASP.NET interface that will interface with several merchants and processing front ends so that my visitors won’t be constrained to a set method of payment.
I’m planning to utilize a Small Business Merchant Account from onlinecheck.com to take care of the credit card people since I just find that having to go through the entire PayPal fiasco to end up using a credit card is a bit of a run around. I’m also planning to build it around PayPal and the other traditional online methods like MoneyBookers but the point is to give options. The script I’m planning should be capable of scaling from selling e-books to a fully managed Web Hosting Ecommerce Merchant Account for managing a website’s entire sales repertoire
The only question that remains is how best to implement the payment options. I’m considering locking them to a set of prescreened and fully implemented processors that I know work. But the alternative possibility is for me to make it extensible and able to add alternative sites for Online Credit Card Processing in case the need should arrive that a site isn’t quite cutting it I just need to swap out a plugin instead of a full new version. But I suppose it comes down to if I’m keeping it inhouse for my own sites or giving it away/selling it to developers.
As always I’m open to suggestions from fellow techies and developers :)
