Bart has pretty much covered the payment-gateway description.
An EZIC payment-gateway also exists[1], but not in the CVS yet, as it will be a few weeks or so before it gets upgraded from working with OpenACS 4.6.3 to 5.x (and put into CVS contrib). Feel free to do that. ;)
EZIC has responded well to open-source development for use of their services[2]. Their direct-mode documentation[4] was outdated in Jaunary, now is on par with other services.
Here are some advantages and limitations of the EZIC and Authorize gateways that I have encountered:
Operations perspective:
EZIC offers flexible permissions access from multiple websites, with the capability of setting different user accounts for each.[3] Each EZIC user-account can set a different description that shows in the credit card holder's bill. ie. mywebsite1.com mywebsite2.com etc.
Authorize.net offers 1 user-account per merchant account.
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An EZIC merchant account can have up to 4 different active merchant banks connected to it. The merchant switches banks via the web.
Authorize.net offers connection to 1 merchant bank per merchant account.
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Authorize.net provides direct support to merchants.
EZIC requires merchants to direct *all* customer support through their EZIC resellers.
Technical perspective:
EZIC requres separate first_names and last_name for validation processing, whereas Authorize.net uses a single name field for both. This problem was reconciled by adding a 3 space delimiter between first_names and last_name in ec_addresses.attn. The change has no effect on the authorize-gateway package, while allowing other payment-gateways, such as ezic, to parse separate fields.[5]
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authorize-gateway requires installing dqd_utils, ezic-gateway does not use it.
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1. http://dekka.net/openacs/ezic-gateway.tar
2. http://www.ezic.com/Alliances/Alliances.htm
3. http://ezic.com/resellerSolutions/featursAndBenefits.htm
4. https://secure.ezic.com/public/docs/merchant/public/directmode/
5. https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/com/ecommerce/bug?bug_number=1385
