[ale] Shopping cart and CC software for Linux

[Joe Knapka]

Hello all,

Sometime in the near future I will be setting up a web site for a
friend's small business.  He wants to sell merchandise on his site,
which implies some kind of shopping-cart service; and he wants
to be able to accept PayPal and credit-card payments. The site
will be hosted on a Linux server (not sure what distro, but I think
it's RH Enterprise) at phpwebhosting.com, which means we'll
have Apache, PHP, and MySQL available, as well as all the
usual tools (Perl, etc).

I'm pretty comfortable with all the tools involved, but I've
no idea where to begin looking for shopping-cart and
payment-processing solutions.  In particular, the credit-card
handling part is very mysterious to me; I have the impression
that a lot of sites farm that function out to third parties?

Any advice about where to start looking for information
would be very helpful.  Open-source tools would be
preferred, of course.

Thanks,

-- JK