I am a web developer working with a client who uses clover. They have asked me to build a website which will include online payment functionality.
I have never used Clover before and in fact never heard of it until this morning. What I am accustomed to is the Paypal IPN system for doing this sort of thing. Essentially how this works is, the user submits a form on my site directly to PayPal. This form contains data about what the user is purchasing and how much it costs, but not any payment information. When the user is directed to PayPal's site, they then enter their payment data there. Once the payment has been made, the user is redirected back to my site. Paypal will also send a request directly to my site which will inform me if the payment was successful.
I have also used a similar procedure through
Authorize.net. In this case, my server sends a request to
Authorize.net which includes the information regarding the purchase, such as items and prices, but again not sensitive into like Credit Card numbers.
Authorize.net then sends me a redirect URL which I then send to the user. Once the payment is complete the user is redirected back to me, and I check with
Authorize.net to ensure the payment was successful.
I much prefer this approach to using a REST API or similar, because from a security standpoint it seems much better if my server never even so much as sees the credit card number or any potentially sensitive data. There's no chance of me messing it up and a mishandling sensitive info because sensitive data is processed directly by the payment processor.
I've been looking through the documentation for Clover, and I am not able to find anything like this. The closest I can find is the section on WebHooks, which seem to operate similarly in the sense that it will send requests to my site to inform me about events. However, the documentation there seems a little sparse, and I wasn't able to find how I would redirect a user to Clover to complete a payment.
Do you have a method to accomplish this? Essentially I'm looking for a way to do online payment processing where my server doesn't see touch or handle the sensitive data in any way.
