Basically, I'm creating a website for a friends bread and breakfast company. She wants the website to have a page where you can pay through the website, booking a room. I believe this has to be done through some sort of secure server?

 

Could somebody link me to a guide or tell me roughly what I'm going to need to do.

 

thanks.

It all depends how advanced the booking system is going to be. If it's just a case of having rooms people can buy at a specific price you could probably get away with simple paypal buttons, and handle it all through that, If you're developing a full booking system that takes payments on the site you will need to get an SSL certificate to make sure the data sent/received is secure

Hmm, thanks for the post +1

But say you choose the date, what room, how long etc, then could you use a PayPal button? Can people pay even if they don't have PayPal?

Yeah it's possible to use paypal even if you don't have an account (you will need to change a setting in your merchant account for them in order to show the credit card form when it redirects to paypal). If you're wanting to send all that info to paypal (room, date etc) then you will likely have to build it or customise a pre-built shopping cart to do so, and use the PP cart api to get the payment processed

For low volumes, it'll be easiest if you use a third party payment provider like PayPal, MoneyBookers etc.

 

If you go down the road of doing this more in-house (lower cost per transaction), there are still a number of solutions. At a minimum you will need a Merchant Account with a UK provider (this is not the same as a commercial/business bank account) - this is the most difficult part as you may be declined due to risk. After you have a Merchant Account (or before setting it up), talk to several merchant payment service providers. These providers will collect the details on your behalf, via the merchant account, the latter who will (after a few days) then deposit the funds in your UK bank account.

 

Solutions with a payment service provider range from them hosting everything (much like PayPal, but depending on transaction volume with lower fees), to you hosting only an SSL payment page, to you hosting everything and only passing them API calls with transaction details.

 

Be aware that as you take more responsibility on yourself, you will need to become more stringent with PCI compliance - the industry standard for ensuring security of card acceptance. If you are doing any of the payment processing/hosting yourself, at a minimum you would need to complete a self-assessment questionnaire and pay for quarterly network scans.

 

In most cases it is simplest to either use a complete outsourced solution like PayPal, or to use a merchant provider's fully hosted solution, unless you require additional functionality not provided by either of those approaches.

Okay thank-you for the help both of you, really apprieciate it and will update you guys how it goes!

Will be using PP.

Hi Greg,

 

If you want to save yourself some time and still have a really good booking system on hand when needed, then I suggest you try out Sirvoy Reservation System's free trial. Many web developers choose to use Sirvoy as we have over the years spent thousands of hours perfecting our system by listening to any feedback and adjusting the system accordingly.

 

If you have any questions I'll be happy to answer.

 

Regards

Mats

You can take payments directly on your site with 'paypal payments pro hosted' and you wouldn't need to worry about PCI DSS at all - they have it covered. The normal unhosted paypal payments pro (imo) is pointless and will probably disappear.