Having a comprehensive payment and shipment policy goes a long way to running a successful online business. After completing this chapter, you should now know exactly what you need to do in order to implement your own store’s payment and shipping functionality. Hopefully, you will have decided to take as little risk as possible by handing over your customer’s credit information to secure and trusted providers. I should reiterate the fact that you should only use trusted payment service providers—there are a lot of fraudsters out there.

So, by this stage you should have all your payment facilities up and running, with all the requisite accounts working as they should. Further, your calculations of the price of goods should include shipping options with the correct values for your target customers. But the job is not done yet. Recall that we are communicating with PayPal’s IPN server without the use of encryption. Even worse, we have not secured any part of the site yet—it is wholly possible that a hacker could gain control of your entire site without too much trouble.

Remember to comprehensively test every conceivable permutation of payments, incorrect payments, shipping details, incorrect addresses, and so on before you consider your payments and shipping to be robust enough to take to the live site.