I just don’t have the time to learn and do this.
I need to create an online reservation form for Flying M Air. It should be secure and run on my server. It should be able to pull tour names and prices from a database I can maintain and do calculations based on what customers choose. It should be able to securely collect credit card and other personal information required to charge the card. It does not need to have credit card approval access; I am prepared to do all that manually. It would be nice if it could include a “special offer key” that discounted the flight for people who entered the correct code. Again, I’d want to maintain that myself. When the form is submitted, it should send a summary of the info to me and the customer. I should get it in a format I can use to import into an Excel or FileMaker Pro database for further processing.
The idea is for the form to collect reservation info from people who just don’t want to call and do it on the phone. I don’t have a toll-free number and I occasionally get tourists from overseas as customers. This would help people who don’t want to make that toll call or live in a very different time zone to handle their reservation securely.
My server runs at GoDaddy.com. It’s a Unix box with PHP and MySQL. The solution would have to integrate perfectly with my existing Web site design, which was developed with WordPress. (I can assist with the form creation part.) You can see it at www.FlyingMAir.com. I’d put the form on a WordPress page.
I have a budget for this, but if you or someone else you know can do the job and save me the bother of learning to do it myself, I’m certainly willing to pay. I will not, however, pay by the hour — I’ve seen too many people milked by Web developers on a hourly rate. I’m also not interested in hosting on a different server or setting up a system that will require me to retain someone to update database contents.
Interested? Leave a comment on this post. You don’t have to provide any info other than your e-mail address in the form field; I’ll contact you directly that way.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Dave Buchholz // Dec 12, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Storing/Sending Credit Card Numbers is a really bad idea no matter how secure you think it is, you leave yourself open to the possibility of exposing these details and facing legal action as a consequence.
A much better way would be to get a merchant account and have customers pay through that so you are never exposed to their credit card details.
2 Maria Langer // Dec 12, 2007 at 5:12 pm
You have a good point. I do have a merchant account, however. I manually enter credit card info when I need to charge a customer for a flight. There’s no danger of my employees getting the info because I don’t have any. What I probably need to do here is have the info sent to me online somehow and then deleted from the system within a short period of time so it isn’t online.
Thanks for your input.
3 Don Wood // Dec 13, 2007 at 12:47 am
Have you considered setting up a shopping cart on goDaddy? It could do all you want and can be linked to credit card gateways. I’m not sure how it would work trying to handle cc’s manually though. goDadddy offers two osCommerce and ZenCart.
It seems like you might be interested in a shopping cart for services that could be linked to a calendar with your tours defined to block out available time on the calendar. Sorry, I haven’t seen that yet.
Just curious, would a Adobe Flash based application be acceptable?
Don Wood’s last blog post: Application and Logic Development
4 Maria Langer // Dec 13, 2007 at 6:24 am
I’ll look into the GoDaddy shopping cart, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it’ll require me to open another merchant account. I already have one that charges monthly fees; I’m not too excited about the possibility of another. But I’ll definitely look into it.
A solution that is linked to an availability calendar would be excellent but not yet necessary. I run a small operation and we have plenty of availability right now.
Flash is possible, if it could be made to work with my existing site or pop up in its own window.
At this point, I’m starting to think that it might be best to skip the credit card info and just get reservation requests. I can then get the credit card info when I call to confirm the reservation. This is not the best solution for overseas customers coming to Arizona on future vacations, but it could work.
In case you’re all wondering why I need credit card info up front, it’s to protect me from getting stiffed on a flight to the Phoenix area to pick up a passenger that doesn’t show. It hasn’t happened yet — probably because I get credit card info up front and they know I’ll charge the card for a cancellation fee if they don’t adhere to the cancellation policies (4 hours notice for most flights.).
5 Barbara Ward // Dec 14, 2007 at 11:04 am
Hi Maria,
I’m just wondering if you could tell us what merchant account you do have now? Don Wood does have a very good point in that you shouldn’t store credit card information on your own database. If you have an online merchant account already, they probably have a way to hook up to it via a script and send the user to an online ‘form’ on the merchants site to store the credit card information.
Would love to talk more about this job if you’re still looking for someone!
6 Maria Langer // Dec 16, 2007 at 8:47 am
I have a merchant account that came with a standard terminal. I plug it into my phone line and manually enter the info when I get back to my office from a flight. (Sometimes I charge before a flight; it depends on the flight and where it’s conducted.)
You need to understand that during my “busy” season, I might process only 2 to 4 transactions A WEEK. So we’re not talking about a huge database of credit card numbers. And I am the only employee here. The information is destroyed after a year or so.
I seriously doubt that I can hook up my current system to anything. But it’s affordable to me — other merchant accounts have huge fees associated with them that I simply can’t justify for a half-year business.
7 Seth // Mar 12, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Hi Maria - Have you considered one of the WordPress shopping cart plugins, like wp-e-commerce? WPEC integrates with PayPal and/or Google Checkout, and it’s fairly easy to maintain.
I work for The Next Wave, an advertising/web marketing company based in Dayton, Ohio. We use this shopping cart on the majority of our client’s websites (we also are a huge fan of WP in general and most of our client’s are using WP). Please email me if you have any questions- we might be able to help you.
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