Ben, thank you for your offer to help devising a payment infrastructure. Help is always welcome. The best thing at this point is to wait for our first technical draft which I will publish here.
Janine and I have just started to kick around some ideas. Janine will be using the infrastructure we come up with to implement an interface to Verisign while I'll be working on an Aiuthorize.net interface.
The infrastructure we are considering is similar to the OpenFTS based search package. We are currently evaluating the use of acs-service-contract for our purposes.
Although it will take some time for the infrastructure to be created I do have a package that mimicks the old CyberCash gateway. With this package in place you can evaluate the current state of the ecommerce package. The ecommerce package is fully functional to a large extent, the major missing link being the credit card gateway.
Ben, drop me a line if you are interested and I'll give you a copy of the CyberCash simulator. I'll can place a copy in the OpenACS file storage should there be more interest from the community.
