If you really want to engage in electronic commerce, it is necessary to enable your customers to pay directly for the ordered goods. This is precisely the basic difference between an Internet catalog and a real online store.

This goal can be achieved in several ways. Online payment services such as PayPal are the simplest solution, as they allow you to easily transfer funds. Their biggest disadvantage is reflected in the fact that both parties – buyer and seller – must have open orders because the transfer of funds is done indirectly. If you want to enable your customers to pay by card, it would be best to opt for Stripe because it allows you to put everything you need for electronic payment on your site. This means that the system will automatically download all the necessary data, perform a check and finally transfer the funds to your bank account. I will do my best to show you both mentioned systems in more detail in the lessons that follow.

For now, it is enough for you to master the basic terms, which primarily refers to data protection. Since the system you have chosen will automatically ensure that the entire process, from checking the available funds to their withdrawal and transfer to the seller’s account, runs without any complications, it remains for you to take care of the security of the Online Store itself. To that end, it is necessary to provide the so-called SSL certificate. All sites that are secured in this way have a symbol in the form of a small padlock in front of the address. In practice, this means that the entire communication between the WEB server on one side and the user on the other side is done in encrypted form. In this way, it is guaranteed that there will be no traffic “drainage” and that all key data, such as the color of the card and the funds on it, are completely safe.

However, there is also the possibility that the payment can be made indirectly, for this purpose, the customer is redirected to a special site, for example PayPal, and then returns to your online store. In this case, your partner, the service through which the payment is made, takes care of all security.

Regardless of this possibility, I recommend that you secure your online store in an appropriate way. If you have already done this, it is necessary to adapt WooCommerce to the new environment. To this end, you need to look for the section called Checkout in the Settings frame and activate the Force secure checkout option. After that, another security option will appear on the screen, but you can leave it off. If you save the new parameters at the end, all users of your site will have to use an encrypted form of communication, which will automatically affect payment security.

Since this site is located on my local computer, there is no possibility to use SSL mode directly, so I will temporarily disable this option. As soon as I put its content on my web server, I will try to get the protection back on.