Today's Web developer needs to have a thorough knowledge of how to build commerce-enabled Web sites. One of the most mysterious areas, for clients and Web shops alike, is the process of setting up a Web-enabled credit card merchant account. If you search for information on credit cards, you'll find page after page of outfits, all offering to get your credit card scene together pronto and cheapo. I am sorry to say that not a few of these outfits are shaky, shady, or simply scams. I won't begin this article by expounding the virtues of credit cards, because that would sound too much like the blobs of Spam that appear in your mailbox every day.
Credit cards are here now, and are rapidly becoming the payment method of choice whenever possible.
Most or all of the retail business transacted over the Web is done with credit cards. You can also forget the scare stories you've heard about credit card security risks. The whole rigmarole about hackers sniffing packets and harvesting your credit card numbers made great press, and sold a tremendous number of magazines about a year ago, but it was mostly pretty far-fetched stuff, and it's old news now. For obvious reasons, credit card numbers are much more likely to be stolen when you use your card in a restaurant or over the phone than when you use it over the Web. By taking a few simple precautions, you, the Web site owner, can make it difficult enough to breach your security that it simply wouldn't be worth anyone's time to make the attempt.