Integrate a website with Authorize.net

The merchant account services blog, just came out with a guide on integrating a website with Authorize.net.

The guide is written for websites using PHP 5, Curl, and SSL to connect a website to authorize.net using the API method (Known as AIM with Authorize.net).

PHP 5 is required for this particular script. There are several PHP 5+ functions that will make the script completely incompatible with PHP 4. Unfortunately a good percentage of servers are still using PHP 4. Apart from that, it looks like this guide should be all that a developer needs to successfully integrate authorize.net into a shopping cart system.

I really like the feature where the script automatically retries a transaction 3 times if there is an error. This can be common with payment gateways, and it’s definitely not good to return an error or declined message if you absolutely don’t have to. The script also validates the card number using a simple version of the LUHN algorithm to verify the card number against a check-sum, in addition to performing basic card number and expiration date checks.

When it’s all said and done the script will return an approved, error or declined message for your customer’s transaction, and you can send them to whatever page or message on your website that you want.

This script is complete, but I don’t think that a new programmer should change anything they don’t understand, because they have the potential to open security holes if their programming gets broken. This is especially important since this script will transfer sensitive information across web servers.

There are a variety of free and paid scripts out there, but this one is written by a competent group of individuals that have extensive knowledge of payment processing, web development, and web security, so I highly recommend it.

Check it out:
Integrate the Authorize.net Payment Gateway with PHP