If you're in the business of selling combine harvesters or supercomputers, you won't expect potential customers to actually make purchases through the web. However, if you are selling lower-priced items that make sense to be purchased by credit card, it's possible to set up your web so that the customer can actually purchase your product on the web.
The main difficulty with doing this is that the Internet is in insecure medium. In theory (though probably not often in practice) any computer that carries the IP packets that make up the communication between the web client (with which your customer is communicating) and your server can analyse the packets and figure out what is being communicated. This is completely unacceptable for the transfer of credit cards and other monetary information and so a solution must be found.
One solution is to use the secure protocol feature of Netscape clients and servers. If this is switched on, the session between the Netscape client and server is encrypted using public key encryption. This enables the credit card information to reach the server safely.
Another solution is to take orders through a form in your web, but to bill the customer separately.
Another solution is to use one of the many forms of electronic cash available.
Another solution is to allow the user to order a product on
the web and to specify the entire order through that channel, but
to phone and answering machine (specifically set up for this
purpose) and read just their name and their credit card number.
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