Forum OpenACS Q&A: Ecommerce 4.5b available

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Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on

Ecommerce 4.5b is a major upgrade of the prior version (4.2a). The new version:

  • Is more stable, having fixed many bugs and logged tons of testing.
  • Includes up-to date documentation.
  • Accepts various credit card gateways instead of the obsolete CyberCash. The new Payment Sercice Contract allows Ecommerce to interface to any credit card gateway. Current implementations are available for Authorize.net and PayflowPro.
  • Accepts various shipping rules in addition to the ecommerce shipping rules. The default shipping rules of Ecommerce can be super-ceded by implementations of the new Shipping Service Contract. Value-based Shipping is the first implementation of the shipping service contract. This implementation calculates the shipping charges based on the total value of the shipment and the destination.
  • Handles goods that don't require shipping more gracefully. Rather than denying shipments all together the Ecommerce version allows hard goods to be shipped. Soft goods are authorized and processed at the time of order. This enables Ecommerce to safely sell goods that don't require shipping such as license keys, downloadable software, on-line courses etc.
  • Collects both the shipping address and the billing address.

See the documentation of the ecommerce package for more information.

The new Ecommerce version is available from the HEAD of the OpenACS CVS.

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Posted by Rafael Calvo on
thanks Bart!
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Posted by Hamilton Chua on
  
Hi,   
   
I was trying to install the Payment Gateway Package and encountered   
this error.   
   
Request Error   
   
psql:payment-gateway-sc-create.sql:128: ERROR:  Cannot insert a   
duplicate key into unique index acs_sc_msg_types_name_un   
   
I am studying the create script now to see if I can work around it.   
   
Best Regards,   
   
 
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Posted by Jun Yamog on
Hi Ham,

Most likely you have a db that was installed an ecommerce module
already.  So the problem maybe the drop scripts not cleaning out
properly.  You should be able to look at the sql see what is the
value that causing the duplicate and manually nuke it in the
meantime.

If you are doing this in the office maybe I can help tomorrow.  If
you are in the house then good luck I know you can figure this out
without any difficulty.

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Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
Jun & Ham, the problem was in the Payment Service Contract and has been fixed. Just remove the package, download a new copy from CVS and try again.

/Bart

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Posted by Alexander Antonakakis on
I got this erron on installation of the package. It doesn't seem to affect somewhere (I haven't seen somethin yet) but it keeps showing on loading aolserver.

[11/Jun/2002:15:48:59][22855.1024][-main-] Error: QD_LOGGER = Error parsing queryfile /web/openacs-4/packages/ecom
merce/www/admin/orders/items-return-4.xql:

invalid node ID

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Posted by Luis Garcia on
Hi,
I have the old version of e-commerce and would like to upgrade. My OpenACS version is 4.5b. Do I need to upgrade the whole thing or just that module? Also, if I want to upgrade from the beta version of OpenACS to the release one what do I do? new install?

Thanks

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Posted by Richard Hamilton on
Bart,

Thank you very much for making your update available so soon after the release on 4.5. I will be installing it over the next few days. I am very interested in the payment services contract because the option to bill in multiple currencies would be very useful, but I don't want to hand off the connection to another site/server and I would like the payment processing to take place within an AOLServer  thread just as with Cybercash/ PayfloPro.

Given the choice, which of the two processing solutions would you recommend I spend my time on?

Regards
Richard

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Posted by Richard Hamilton on
Actually, I just went to the CVS to try to find the ecommerce module and all I see is a heading of '/openacs-4' but with no files available to download. I see that version 4.6 is imminent. Will the upgraded ecommerce module be part of that release and will it be postgres enabled?

Regards
Richard

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Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
Richard,

the current version of the payment service contract does not support multiple currencies. This, however is easily ammended. With respect to which credit card processor to use -- Authorize.net or Verisign's PayflowPro -- both are very comparable. In both cases your site will have to communicate with another web server, either via https or a propriatery protocol on top of tcp/ip. Pick the one you feel most comfortable with. And don't forget to compare prices and support of both vendors.

For CVS access read the CVS howto at: https://openacs.org/new-file-storage/download/cvs.html?version_id=140

/Bart