I am trying to implement a 'Pay Now' button on my website for the first time. I have designed my own customer information, and just want to pass cart contents and total to PayPal for payment processing. I am completely new to this, so please be gentle :D! I am leaning toward simple Payment Standard HTML form, which I can customize through PHP. No problem there. I have a SSL certificate through my web host.
My question is how or even whether I should go about encrypting the individual form name/value pair fields. Obviously, I don't want a hacker to be able to alter or re-direct any of the payment process. Does the SSL take care of this so that I don't need to worry? If so, how to I properly implement my SSL certificate in my data transfer with PayPal? If not, then how do I approach encrypting my button data (as PayPal seems to recommend)?
I was also thinking of having my purchase button link to a page with a form that auto submits on opening so that source code cannot be easily snooped... thoughts?
I know this is a big can of worms, but appreciate the expertise of everyone here in sharing their thoughts!! Thank you in advance :)