Payment gateway services and pass the products info to payment gateway.

blackhorse

When I use a payment gateway services, I would like them to hold the product Item Information, product code, product description, price, quantity etc.

Advantage of sending products information to payment gateway is that you can use the payment gateway's database to confirm the transacation and get the order at the same time, let the payment gateway site creates the receipt page and email. Simple, and authentic.

I have been using one big European payment gateway, 1 big USA payment gateway, but none of them hold the products information. I have to trickly use their footer note area etc. to get my orders information in.

Two canadian payment gateway, PSI and Moneris did hold the products information.

PSI did that, but it only allows 25 items of products. Usually, it will be OK. Because 99% of our shoppers are not going to make order more than 25 items per order. But what if they are over 25 items? How do you handle that?

Option 1) don't allow it over 25 items. if it is, ask the shopper to make 2 orders.

Disadvantate is it is inconvient to the shopper, they may drop the order.

Option 2) allow over the 25 items.

Advantage is no inconvience for the shopper. But disadvantage is that we cannot 100% depends on payment gateway to hold the product information even 99% of our orders are not over 25 items per order.

Disadvantage is we will have to built up our own order database to hold the products information and create the receipt page and receipt email from our own site even it is just to satify that 1% or less orders we may have.

What is your choice?

Moneris allows the product information sent to them too. And they don't have limitation about how many items per order. Whcih is good.

But they have another limiation, product code max. 10 chars. product description (name, size and color) 15 chars. (IN psi, product code max. 50 chars. product description max. 200 chars. What a difference?)

In this case, 15 chars are not enough to hold the product name, size and color, and the tech support said they would suggest not to over use that limit due to it would cause unexpected results, decline the transaction etc.

So do you have experience with this kind limitation?

To me, it seems if I cannot limit the description within 15 chars. It is better not send the products information to them, due to if I cut the description short, it will give the wrong description such as "rain coat yellow-green" may become "rain coat yellow"

What is your choice?

cretaceous

seems to me you're overcomplicating it ...
plus it seems over optimistic to be relying on the gateway to store your order details.

I did this with Worldpay - a UK based gateway:
pass in the order id from the order on your site
(you're using a cart arent you? - so store the full order details of the cart in your db with a unique id)

so that ID contains a million items - doesnt matter

you can usually have a couple of user fields that get sent to the gateway - for order id etc

and do a callback, or whatever its called, so the transaction returns the order id to you to say if its confirmed or not

the only disadvantage is that the gateway invoice will only say:
650 items total cost $3478.19

but why is it a big deal to send the customer your own generated order confirmation ?

if the gateway rejects it or screws up, which does happen, you have a record of what the customer ordered ..
and you are less tied to the proprietary requirements of a specific gateway

blackhorse

Our e-commerce systems have our own orders database no matter what payment gateways we will use, and update the transaction status based on payment gateway reponses. We will use the orders information for sales stats etc.

And we will generate our own email and online receipt page if payment gateway doesn't have the products info stored.

But I wish the payment gateway can store the products information, it is more for the merchant's convience. Because merchants cannot depend on the email notice approval of the transaction from the payment gateway to send the products or offer the service. The merchants always have to go to the payment gateway to check their orders online.

And it is not a big deal to payment gateway to store the products information as storage cost is much cheaper and database is much powerful than before. What a big deal to store product codes as 50 max. instead of 10 max. or store products description as 200 max. instead of 15 max. Well they didn't do it. I guess it is due to their system was on old design. Funny thing is that this canadian based payment gateway allow USA clients store products codes as 30 chr max. and description as 50 chr. max. 3 times more than their canadian clients allowed.

If the payment gateway holds the products information, then the merchant doesn't need to go to second place, his own site's online database, to grab the order detail information.

But you are right, we don't have to overcomplicate the situation, and wish all payment gateways have the ability as we wish. Just keep the flexibiliy of our own system and deal with whatever the offers of the payment gateway the merchant select.

cretaceous

yes, but the merchant can only ever have a generic system that will not match every customers requirements

merchants only need to compete with each other - until one offers better services the others wont follow

full merchant status for yourself is the only solution !

(I understod from your first post your own system was more basic than it actually is)

I recently integrated another site with Paypal credit card acceptance and was surprised to find it more professional than Worldpay - so they at least seem to have helped raise the bar here (ignoring the criticism on other matters)

Elizabeth

Why would the merchant be going to the payment gateway to check orders, especially if he already has a back end admin interface for his store? That doesn't seem to make much sense... shouldn't he be going to his online shop to see what orders are out there? Surely he can't keep track of what's been shipped and tracking numbers and such through his payment gateway interface. Honestly, the only time we go to our gateway interface is if there is a problem or question about a transaction, or if we need to issue a credit or something like that.

Weedpacket

Elizabeth wrote:
Why would the merchant be going to the payment gateway to check orders, especially if he already has a back end admin interface for his store?

I had to blink a couple of times at this. I just realised that this is an instance of object orientation as it applies to the real world: having a payment gateway do order tracking seems like a violation of the single responsibility principle.

blackhorse

Actually it was not a big deal to have the payment gateway hold the item information, just some of them have it. It is easy to the merchant.

I don't mean use the payment gateway to do the order tracking. But I do mean if the merchant receive the transaction notice (email notice from the payment gateway or his own online databaes receive the response http(s) post etc. from payment gateway) he does need to go to payment gateway database to double check, he cannot solely depends on the notice he receives and send out the products.

Two large payment gateway services I have been working with specially claim this rule in their documents.

So my point is if the merchant has to go to the payment gateway to make sure the transaction is official, then if the items information is there already, he can grab it at the same time, it would be easy. Plus, if there is a roll back, partial roll back etc. He can just go to payment gateway and check the order detail at the same time, too instead of he has to go to second place his own online database to check the order detail for the transaction he has to refund, partial refund etc.

For the rest of the order process and tracking the merchant should still do it on his own store database.

We manage and host the sites we develop on our own server like you guys case I think so we are relatively OK.

But many mechants use off-shelf e-commerce systems such as zencart, osscommerce, set up on a shared hosting environment with hundreds clients nobody know whom are they. Of course, these merchants cannot just solely depends on their backend database' transaction status (updated from whatever payment gateway they use) to send out the products or offer the service.

They have to go to the payment gateway database to be on the safe side.

There are other reasons.

For exampe, we have an incident recently, payment gateway service approved the transaction and send a response to this merchant's online database in a secured page on our server, but didn't recognize that we got the message. in 15 seconds, so payment gateway changed the order to error (merchant didn't receive the "approval" message error.) The transaction was terminated. and due to it was error of message not received, so this error status was not sent out to us again.)

But actually our system did get the approval message and update our online system. it was the payment gateway's listening page's failure to get our "message received" notice.

In simple words, the payment gateway send us "approval" status, we update our own database. It failed to recognize that we got their message, and it terminated the transaction and changed the transaction to "error" and no new status response would be sent to us.

What we have for this transcation? "approval". What they have? "error".

And the merchant against my advice, have been solely depending on his own merchant online database system on our server to send out the products without bothering to check the payment gateway service database. He has done these for months without problem. But this time, when he found out, he called the payment gateway. Their answer is that due to there would be interruptions in the response channel, this incident could happend. we told you to check out our database.