osCommerce

The Saferpay payment module I first worked on for the new post-transaction action features of 3.0 was implemented with a program Saferpay provides that is used to communicate to the payment gateway. The use of this program is similar to using cURL but had the disadvantage that it had to be manually installed and that the output of the program had to be saved to a file.

Creating the files was no problem as it was easily done in the osCommerce working directory, and deleted as soon as it was no longer needed.

I previously blogged about implementing an additional Saferpay module that uses SOAP to communicate to the payment gateway, which did not require the use of the “saferpay” binary.

When I started to look into it, I did not understand the documentation provided of how the system works and asked Saferpay for help. They suggested that I use a more simpler approach as setting up the module would have been too technical for store owners to achieve, and forwarded me the necessary documentation. I did not know of this simpler method beforehand and was thrilled that they provided yet another means of being able to communicate to their gateway.

The simpler approach uses normal HTTPS POST connections to communicate to their gateway, and is common for payment service providers to use.

I agree that setting up a SOAP based module would have been too technical seeing that most store owners that use the PayPal IPN module have not set it up with the Encrypted Web Payments feature it supports. And that, in contrast, is pretty easy to setup.

I’ve now updated the Saferpay Credit Card, ELV (bank transfer), and Virtual Terminal payment modules to use the HTTPS POST method, with all 3 modules retaining the same functionality and post-tranaction actions as introduced earlier.