Payment integration - ePDQ and Protx

Rails
1

Hi guys,

We’re looking to set up payment integration using one of these two
gateways -
has anyone worked with these and has some pre-written classes/plugins
for either
of them?

If not, has anyone worked with them and found them easy to work with?

Thanks,
Gareth

2

Gareth A. wrote:

Hi guys,

We’re looking to set up payment integration using one of these two gateways -
has anyone worked with these and has some pre-written classes/plugins for either
of them?

I’m also interested in Protx integration. I use it statically with my
current site and it seems pretty decent for the price, but their site
does get slow during heavy usage periods

There are a number of easy to use solutions to plug in the forms based
authentication, but really it’s the proper API integration which is
needed. I think most of these systems work pretty much the same behind
the scenes and it shouldn’t be a problem to add either some custom
integration or add support to that rails payment gateways gem (whatever
it’s called?)

The main work is just making sure that your DB is setup so that it can
handle the multi-state transitions which occur during the customer
visiting the Protx pages - essentially it’s something like:

  • Create an Order here
  • Send the Order id, plus price plus address details to Protx
  • Hope the customer finishes the transaction…
  • New call to your system from Protx saying that everything was fine,
    whereupon you double check all the details and the transaction is
    finalised.
  • Customer returns and you tell them the order was completed ok
    … time passes…
  • Possibly customer does not complete order so you have to cleanup part
    complete orders from the DB

I think all the main systems use roughly this model though?

Ed W

3

If not, has anyone worked with them and found them easy to work with?
I’ve carried out 2 epdq integrations and found them a nightmare to
work with. This mainly because their systems seem to be behind
everyone else, despite being Barclays. The main issues are with
testing in that you can’t :0) I’ve spoken to epdq on a number of
occasions and basically, and account can be in test mode of live
mode. If it’s in test mode you can only test successful transactions

  • not very useful. You also get issues when you want to test a new
    piece of functionality with them - they do not have test accounts and
    you cannot use the live mode account.

Other people may have had a better experience, but I’ve worked with
loads of payment gateways and none of them annoy me more than ePDQ.

ProTx on the other hand are much better. I’ve used them on a few
sites and have found them quite good. They offer a few different
types of integration and clients seem to like their pricing
structure. The support is good and they allow you fully test the
integration. You either send the customer to them for clearance or
you can take the card details on your secure server and communicate
with ProTx server-side - this is good for larger sites. They allow
you to do all transaction like refunds, releases and deferred
payments using their server-side API.

Another company I’ve had no problems with is secure hosting
(www.securehosting.com). They offer similar services to ProTx.

Unfortuantly the integrations I’ve done with these companies are all
PHP based so I cannot provide code. However, it’s very simple to
integrate into payment providers. At the very basic level, you
construct the form to send the customer to the gateway, and then
receive a callback to confirm the status of the payment.

Hope that helps,

Steve

4

Stephen B. <steve@…> writes:

[…snip…]

Hope that helps,

Steve

Thanks Steve, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Our client wants
skinned
payment pages so we’re having to go with the API option, and the
Barclays API
document is 774 pages!

We (well, other people at our company) have used Protx before in ASP
pages, and
found it reasonably easy - I think it’s likely that we’ll go down that
route

Any more opinions would still be welcome, of course

Gareth

5

The reason you don’t see as many payment gateways in Europe is because
the companies that control access to the banking networks limit that
access by charging huge fees and doing everything they can to keep the
number of payment gateways to a bare minimum. (…)
And if you are a UK business you can’t just use
a US payment gateway with your UK merchant account because
Visa/Mastercard rules prohibit what they call cross border acquiring.

Do you by chance know of some european payment gateways, that are worth
recommending?
I am developing a site for a Germany-based company and there seem to be
few alternatives to PayPal.

6

On 10/2/06, Stephen B. [email protected] wrote:

If not, has anyone worked with them and found them easy to work with?
I’ve carried out 2 epdq integrations and found them a nightmare to
work with. This mainly because their systems seem to be behind
everyone else, despite being Barclays.

The reason you don’t see as many payment gateways in Europe is because
the companies that control access to the banking networks limit that
access by charging huge fees and doing everything they can to keep the
number of payment gateways to a bare minimum. The existing players
have no real incentive to be competitive, because they have very
little competition. And if you are a UK business you can’t just use
a US payment gateway with your UK merchant account because
Visa/Mastercard rules prohibit what they call cross border acquiring.

7

Hi

Thanks Steve, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Our client wants skinned
payment pages so we’re having to go with the API option, and the Barclays API
document is 774 pages!

You mention that you have used Protx before, so I guess you have some
test accounts with them?

You can “skin” the payment pages by emailing them the template that you
want to use. There are some restrictions to prevent you abusing the
system, but basically you can send them any HTML you like I think?

This means that Protx can handle all the CC info without you needing to
be get your site secure enough to be handling the CC transactions and
passing them through (OK, I don’t quite mean it like it sounds)

I have just used the standard form checkout pages, but I did skim
through the customisation options and it looks quite straightforward.

I guess consider this a thumbs up to Protx - nice pricing options as
well, but you need to check with them that they handle your CC processor
before doing any of the really advanced stuff. I asked about stuff like
continuous authority transactions and the like and they only support it
with certain banks.

Incidently anyone can sign up for a test account with them and they will
let you play around with the system without needing a CC processing
account. Their signup screens are broken when using firefox though…
IE only…

Note: I found it easier to choose a payment processor first and then
choose a supported bank for the CC second. The former does seem to
constrain the latter though…

Ed W

8

Hi there i had done the Epdq payment Gate way integration and it is up
and running if you have any project please let me know.
and i am expert for that.

you can contact me :-
Syed Hussain
[email protected]
Phone No:- 07877622065.
07738943716.
Gareth A. wrote:

Hi guys,

We’re looking to set up payment integration using one of these two
gateways -
has anyone worked with these and has some pre-written classes/plugins
for either
of them?

If not, has anyone worked with them and found them easy to work with?

Thanks,
Gareth