Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to New Ecommerce and Payflow Link

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Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
Hamilton,

now that I have taken a closer look at the Payflow Link documentation, I'm afraid that the ecommerce module is a poor fit for Payflow Link.

The ecommerce module handles financial transactions in 2 stages: an authorization step and a capture step. Authorization is obtained when the customer submits the order. Items that require shipping will not be captured untill those goods are shipped. Soft goods like course registration or software will be captured immediately after authorization has been obtained.

Payflow Link on the other hand authorizes and captures financial transactions in 1 step. You should consider the following use cases in your design:

- Should items be out of stock can the ecommerce administrator refund the customer from the ecommerce admin pages? Or can refunds only be given from the Payflow Link administration site?

- Fulfilling orders from the ecommerce admin pages relies on the 2 step process, you will have to modify this process to accept the 1 step Payflow Link transactions.

- Be sure to pass the customer information collected by Payflow Link to the ecommerce package. The ecommerce checkout process that you bypass with Payflow Link collects shipping and billing information that is later used when fulfilling orders.

I also urge to take a look at Authorize.net as this might be very price competative. Yes, you have to get a SSL certificate but that should cost more than $100/year. The monthly fees for Authorize.net are very modest. They can be as low as $10/month depending on the reseller. Transaction fees are around $0.30/transaction, which -with competative discount rates- can be cheaper than competing discount rates.

I'm not convinced that the low price of Payflow Link outweights the work required to modify the ecommerce package to work with Payflow Link. After all, the ecommerce package already offers merchants a turn-key ecommerce solution, including a shopping cart, order fulfilling and billing. All that the ecommerce package requires is a payment processing service to send the billing information to. With the ecommerce package there is no need to use the Payflow Link checkout pages instead.

Have you tried the ecommerce package with a Payflow Pro test account? You'll notice how no programming experience is required to set up a store once Payflow Pro has been installed.

I'd have to agree with Jun that a shopping cart (not just a product catalog as Payflow Link can only handle the total order amount) would be a better fit for Payflow Link.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions. You can reach my by e-mail or on the OpenACS IRC channel.

/Bart