e-commerce webiste DYI
 

I have written some specialized software in Labview that has proven very useful for the characterization of solar cells in my lab. It is using a very common general purpose instrument. I see a possible market with other university laboratories who want to get in solar cell testing. My idea is to try to sell the program online, by making an e-commerce website for downloading that sofware. Since I have no idea how well it is going to sell, I would like to develop this at minimal cost, keeping in mind that I am not a web developer by trade, just an amateur who can learn fast. As an example, here is the website I made for my lab:

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~adupasqu/

So, my question to the pros is: what basic tools do I need for secure payments (VISA, paypal...) and software protection. Ideally I`d like to find them for free, or really cheap. I plan on selling the software for $99, bearing in mind that the pro version made by the instrument company is several thousands. I like to use NVU for making the website. Thanks to the brain trust SmileWavy.

If you want to do it free then get OSCommerce for your cart and use PayPal and Google gateways.

OS Commerce is the most commonly used open source cart around and a lot of the paid carts, Zen, Xcart etc... are based on it.

OSC has all the necc api's for the most common merchant gateways already built in.

PayPal and Google are about your only options for collecting payment unless you want to get a Merchant Account. If you go that way then Authorize.net is in my opinion the only way to go.

I have dealt with several merchant accounts and auth.net is 1st class.

PM if you need more info.

Great info, thanks.
I will try to build something with OSCommerce.

You can do it with OSCommerce, but you need to be very careful regarding how you set things up. Make sure that your OSCommerce configuration never touches, tastes, feels or smells any card holder data and only hand things off to a PCI DSS Compliant Internet Payment Processing Service Provider(pdf).

Is "DYI", "Do Yourself In"? :p

I recently did this kind of thing myself... I had put together some video processing software for my own use a couple of years ago, and had several people see the results and tell me that there's a market for it (especially when they found out that it could do a Traqmate data overlay). I tied up the loose ends and continued to develop it, then made a website and put it out there as shareware (ie there's a usable free version out there, or people can get more features for a small price). The website is http://www.RaceRender.com if you want to check it out.

What I did was use PayPal and their Instant Payment Notification (IPN) feature, which is actually pretty easy. When someone submits a payment from the "Buy Now" button on my website, PayPal processes it and then contacts a payment notification PHP script at the URL that I specified in my PayPal account preferences. The script is given the details of the transaction via a HTTP POST connection, then it contacts PayPal's server to verify it, and e-mails the user with the activation code for the premium features. You should be able to also have the script e-mail a whole file if you wanted to (you'd just have to encode the embedded file in the e-mail message, or use a function that does it for you). I do most of my coding in C and don't really even "know" PHP, but it was pretty easy to figure it out enough to do what I needed.

Excellent advice ya`ll. I downloaded OScommerce, but it seemed that my learning curve would not match my impatience...Then I found how to create a "buy now" button with paypal, which seems easy enough...

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_html_buynow_buttons#id089UF0NJ0HS