Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

Using an easy-to-read and engaging style, this book introduces the fundamentals of osCommerce, and helps you build your first online store. It covers the out-of-the-box features of osCommerce, but it also shows you how to customize the application to your own needs. The book starts with the basics of downloading and installing osCommerce, or simply how to enable it on your Internet domain using the tools provided by your host. All of the most important configuration issues are explained, with clear instructions and advice to help you make the right choices. Once osCommerce is installed and configured, you will take a good look at how to work with your store's data including product information as well as other data which is responsible for keeping your site healthy. The all important topic of customization is also dealt with comprehensively. You will see how to develop attractive sites that will make your store a pleasure to browse and your products a pleasure to buy! Of course, no discussion on osCommerce would be complete without a look at how to obtain and treat payments. Using the modules provided with osCommerce you will be collecting money from your happy customers in no time! Once the reader has a fully fledged, and operational site it is time to look at deployment? an important topic for discussion if development has taken place on a development machine. The appendix will add a few tools to your armory and shed some light as to what is going on behind the scenes in case things go awry.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Securing Payments


A close second in terms of importance is the ability to secure your payments. Why do I say a close second, instead of the highest importance? The answer is simply this: if you wanted to ensure your payments don’t get hacked online, then you could always ask for bank transfers or some other offline form of payment, whereas there is no way you can maintain your site effectively without the use of some form of online admin tool.

The fundamental goal with respect to securing payments is to make the transmission of sensitive data (which occurs during the checkout stages of a purchase), as well as payment tracking after checkout using IPNs, undecipherable in the event that the transmission is intercepted. Luckily for us, this is the easiest thing in the world to do for the front end of the site, so let’s take a look at that first.

The Front End of the Store

Simply open up the configure.php file in the catalog/includes/ folder and make the following SSL-related modifications (read...