Secure Credit Card handling w/out an actual purchase?

[echoesofspring]

I've looked around and around in the forums, tutorials and download sections, but haven't seen this situation discussed, I hope someone can help, or point me to a relevant resource.
My client has a ‘membership club', customers can sign up to receive quarterly or yearly shipments of products. There is a 3 party (offline) program that handles managing club member information, charging for these shipments, etc. However there are often club members whose credit cards have expired and my client needs an easy way for them to be able to update their information, cancel their membership, sign up, etc.
What I would like to do is to set up a secure form with our zen cart install that would allow customers to join the club, cancel their membership or update their information, including their credit card information. I’d like for this to just be single form, rather than going through the account creation process since many of these club members may never actually make a purchase through the online store.
In another shopping cart system I’ve used I was able to create a custom form that essentially bypassed the checkout mechanism, but had a field I could indicate was a credit card number and needed to be handled accordingly. The admin of the store received the same type of email they would for a purchase, credit card is handled securely, and the customer just have a one page one click process. Is there any sort of feature for this in zencart?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

[DrByte]

Here's a way to collect information and email it to the store owner.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...482#post386482

However, if you intend to email the collected credit card details to someone in order to update your 3rd-party software records, please put a note on your site telling your customers that you'll be EMAILING their CC details somewhere with no security ... so they can decide whether to risk their information.

Just use the concept as a base to work from. Don't email the CC details. In fact, you really shouldn't even store them on your webserver according to PCI rules. Nevertheless, the link above is a reference to one way to collect information from customers without making them create an account.

[echoesofspring]

Hi Dr. Byte, Thank you for responding. I don't plan on either emailing the CC or storing it on the webserver. What I'd like to do is be able to use the functionality that zen cart has for collecting the credit card payment info but without having the user go through the check out process. The store owner would get the same sort of email they would receive if an actual order had been placed, i.e. with just part of the cart, they would then log into zen cart to retrieve the rest of the card so that they could update their (offline) software.

[DrByte]

If you want Zen Cart to handle collecting actual payments the way it does for regular products, you're going to have to set up products that can be purchased. This will also mean that the customers will have to go through regular checkout in order to make payment. At the present time that also means they'll end up creating an account.