Forum OpenACS Development: Response to ecommerce status?

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Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
Cybercash is accepting new accounts till the end of the month (June).
Existing CashRegister accounts can continue to use the current API.

The CashRegister API is the only API that I have found that can query
transactions *and* identintifies transactions by merchant issued order
IDs. The latter is very important as it allows the merchant to track
orders from the start. All other services (Authorize.net, Intellipay,
Goemerchant, etc) track transactions by a transaction code issued by
the gateway. The disadvantage is that when -for whatever reason- your
site did not receive a response to the 'Auth' fase, manual
intervention is required. You the merchant did not receive the
transaction code and you can not query the service by your order ID.

I've looked at several credit card gateways and found that:

- Intellipay can *not* void transactions or credit customers who have
been over charged. See the documentation
(http://www.intellipay.com/Docs/ExpertLink.htm) for more details.

- Goemerchant's API documentation (www.goemerchant.com/guide.htm) is
very skimpy and doesn't even describe the transaction types it
accepts. Despite the fact that there is no setup fee, Goemerchant is
a quite expensive gateway in the long run thanks to a monthly base
fee of 39.99.

- Verisign's PayFlow is the most expensive of the bunch at 59.99 a
month yet doesn't offer a significantly better API. Although one can
query PayFlow for transactions, PayFlow too refers to transactions by
an ID issued by Verisign at the time of authorization. As a result
PayFlow suffers from the same short coming as all other gateways.
However, Verisign (who bought the CyberCash service) is going to
integrate their own PayFlow service with CashRegister so it is likely
that in the long term there will be a new service with the features of
todays CashRegister.

- Authorize.net seems to be the gateway that strikes a balance between
functionality and price. The many resellers of this service drive the
cost down to a minimum. As Gilbert pointed out, the API handles all
transaction types required by the ecommerce module. The workflow has
to change in places but the basic functionality is there. The biggest
challenge is the lack of referencing transactions by merchant
generated order IDs. Authorize.net has decent documentation at
http://www.authorizenet.com/support/docs.php. I belief that
Authorize.net could work well with the ecommerce module but that it
does require revising the ecommerce-credit and the
ecommerce-scheduled-procs scripts.

Gilbert and Janine, could we combine our efforts and work together on
a different gateway than CyberCash? Authorize.net seems to be a good
candidate.