Flash based credit card payments?

Question

Does anyone know how the entire checkout process including credit card validation and payment/transactions can be done in Flash, without redirecting to another HTML page?

Since Flash has all the capabilities of a web browser (page requests, GET, POST) and even some goodies (cross domain page requests, sockets) I'm assuming this shouldn't be too hard.

Ever done something like this? Any help is appreciated. I don't mind using any backend system or intermediary payment gateway, etc.

Thanks

Answer 1

This online training site has a set of free tutorials up describing how to hook into PayPal or authorize.net. I would think in most cases you'd pick your gateway first, based on business concerns, and then work out how to access it from Flash afterwards, but the code in this tutorial might apply to other gateways. (I haven't used the code described.)

Answer 2

I wouldnt personally advise it. If you host a webpage that captures the card details you'll need to go through PCI-DSS compliance, which isnt trivial.

You'll also run into issues with 3dsecure authentication (Verified By Visa / Secure Code) which is typically done using an iFrame.

Answer 3

Well, the first thing to be aware of when considering this sort of thing is that it's trivially easy to decompile an SWF, so for security purposes you'd be using Flash as a thin interaction layer to a server based backend for all your authentication and transaction processing.

Beyond that, the sort of specific security concerns involved are outside my experience.