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We are designing an iPhone app for a client and need to create a store front where users make purchases. I have everything figured out about the app, except how to process the credit card information from the users. The client we are doing this for has a server running Microsoft RMS, which he uses to process orders from his website and stores as well.

Any ideas how we should pass the purchases from the iPhone to the server? (we are designing the server side in c#) And any ideas how our client may be processing those payments now, so that we can integrate easily with their systems? (he uses Microsoft RMS)

Thank you!

pnuts
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Rob
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1 Answers1

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This question has been asked and answered more times than I can count. ( How can I bill within an application )

In addition to that information, you should also check out:

Which talks specifically about a MS RMS approach.

I believe you can setup RMS to import records from a SQL database... which I'd look into, because I think that it will be a lot easier for you to process the transactions in .NET directly through your gateway of choice, and batch the resulting records for import into the RMS system.

This company claims to offer a product that might make your life easier, but i've never used it, or heard about it before now:

http://internettechnologies.com.au/rms.html

Ditto with this one:

http://www.kosmoscentral.com/ecommerce/rms-integration

Otherwise, regarding iPhone <--> Server, I'd suggest you check out setting up a WCF service which uses JSON.... or look into the objective c soap client proxy generators.... but, honestly, JSON is just much much easier to deal with on the iPhone.

Copy of my answer from the other thread:

There are lots of ways to go about setting up e-commerce sites;

If you don't have any experience whatsoever, and don't want to get into anything "complicated", i would suggest going with a customizable web "storefront" hosted by someone else, pre-integrated with credit card processing, etc. There are tons of options for these online. Just search google for "web storefront". Yahoo! even has such a service:

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/sellonline.php

Going beyond that, It's pretty easy to integrate with someone like PayPal. They have all sorts of options from the most basic (use a link to send someone to their site with query string parameters to let paypal know what the user wanted to buy):

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

Beyond that level, you will need to signup for a merchant account, or other similar sort of service, like the one offered by authorize.net (who I like):

http://www.authorize.net/

There are components you can buy for most major web development platforms like .NET, JSP, etc. Perfect example is dotnetcart. These components provide out-of-the-box, easy-to-setup integrations with major CC processing companies, as well as out-of-the-box shopping cart implementations:

http://www.dotnetcart.com/

Finally, most merchant services / payment gateways provide web services for direct integration.

PS.) Never ever ever store CC numbers ; )

Community
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Steve
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  • Is there any way we could simply send our web service the encrypted data in JSON (or XML) format, and have Microsoft RMS handle the payment processing? I don't know what payment processing service the client uses, but I know it gets passed through RMS somehow. How could we send the data from a C# app to RMS? – Rob Jun 15 '11 at 06:16
  • You can use HTTPS to handle the encryption. I don't _think_ the RMS system has "simple" .NET integration. I believe your website needs to act like a cash register sitting in your web "store", and you'll need to integrate with a storefront version of RMS via SQL to push your transactions into RMS HQ. I don't believe there is any sort of API that lets you submit a transaction for CC processing and get a result back. You should complete the financial transaction in .NET and enter the appropriate goods/services transaction into the RMS storefront DB. – Steve Jun 15 '11 at 06:23
  • Also, no idea about this product, but you might want to check it out: http://internettechnologies.com.au/rms.html – Steve Jun 15 '11 at 06:29