How do I set up an e-commerce site that accepts photo uploads and takes credit card payments?
Might I suggest hiring someone? No offense, but it seems like you have none of the experience or skills necessary for ecommerce, and many developers are quite used to working with a designer/whatever your role is. 2. There are several free image libraries that aren’t too tough to install, or maybe even come with the existing hosting, such as GD and ImageMagick. I believe GD is mostly php but ImageMagick has libraries for all the popular server side options. Any server side language will be able to handle image uploads. 3. You should probably stick to paypal or google checkouts as site security is pretty difficult. Search around for “payment gateways” though, as that is the industry term for what you are looking for. 4. Email is a crappy way to get info to a client because it is 100% not secure. You will want a backend the client can log into and probably hacking a store is the best way to accomplish this.
You should be considering how to handle the ecommerce completely separately from the upload-a-photo portion of the site. How this typically works is that the transaction engine will signal back to your site that the CC transaction succeeded (or not), from which point you do whatever needs to be done with the order (whether that’s sending it to fulfillment or sending the user a download of whatever they bought or, in your case, allowing upload of a photo.) Commerce engines just handle the money, they don’t (and shouldn’t) get involved in the inner workings of your site. You absolutely do not want to homeroll your own ecommerce engine. Even if you were an experienced web developer you would not want to do this; it’s too easy to screw up, and that’s not something you want to do when you’re dealing with people’s credit card numbers. There are plenty of existing tools for handling this, with varying degrees of customizability, ranging from (dozens of) prebuilt shopping-cart front ends to mo
I’m a professional in this area, setting up e-commerce sites is my specialty. *Do not* try to roll your own site from scratch. It will steal more time than you can possibly believe. My first store – for myself – took an entire summer to write, and I have twenty years programming experience. The chance that you can do it with your stated lack of skill is next to nil. The chance that you could do it in a secure manner is even closer to nil. That said, investigate your options and then use a good open-source store framework. I hear good things about Magento (a PHP cart). I personally love Satchmo (http://satchmoproject.com) which is Python/Django, but perhaps that’s because I am on the core development team. I do a lot of Drupal work too, but I haven’t tried out Ubercart. I think it looks halfway decent, but a little strange to someone who doesn’t already “think Drupal.” If this is way over your head, hire someone to help set up the store and tell him or her up front that you want mentori
