making authorize.net a little more attractive using SIM...

[webyourbusiness]

SIM integration for Authorize.net is ugly by default - and I mean plain, white and ugly...

Fixing it up and making it a little more "attractive" and even "themed" to your site just isn't that easy - the plain white payment page has been a turn off for at least one client who bothered to phone us and tell us so... and for every one that phones, there have to be a bigger number who just don't bother... and just walk...

To liven up your boring white payment page, you can enter the authorize.net header and footer settings - but these are limited to 255 characters, and if you have several online stores feeding through one authorize.net account, this isn't an option at all!

To fix the problem you need to find the Act_OCCAuthorizeNetTemplate.html file (C:\Program Files\Actinic v7\Sites\Site1\CommonOCC\) and insert a single hidden input variable...

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" name=x_Header_HTML_Payment_Form value="_YOUR_HTML_HERE_">

You can also use:

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" name=x_Footer_HTML_Payment_Form value="_YOUR_HTML_HERE_">

I inserted this AFTER the Actinic variable:

NETQUOTEVAR:OCC_VALUES

Using a CSS call and reference to the header images found on our SSL enabled account, I've been able to make the checkout page a little more attractive in a fairly short amount of time...

See http://www.nod32usa.com/acatalog/

place an order and get as far as payment (or purchase some anti-virus solutions if you need them )...

I'm going to be playing with it some more - but first attempts to put the page boards in place fell foul of something horrible within the tableset provided by the basic SIM integration page... more work needs to be done to overcome this deficiency... at least clients now know it's our checkout page!

I hope this helps those of you with authorize.net white checkout page blues....

regards

Greg

[suncloth]

Greg,

Thank you for the information! I will have to attempt to change our Actinic.net form as well. I looked on the site you referenced and it is a significant improvement over what we have been living with. Please feel free to let us know of any additional improvements you discover in this area.

[webyourbusiness]

Roger,

one thing I noticed about the Authorize.net payment page, is that it's left aligned on the page - I found that annoying to the max - it was an obvious difference between our site and theirs - and the header/footer options we were/are allowed to enter are already bound within a table - therefore preventing us from altering the alignment of the page...

Enter CSS...

I took our css and created a second version of the css, with a center alignment for the body:

body { text-align: center; font-size: 14px; font-family: Arial,Hevetica,sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px }

It also has all of our other CSS in it, so the fonts on the page at least are the same face and approximate size as those we use on our pages...

Without CSS, your stuck with the left aligned, time roman (or whatever your default font is defined as) - and a rather clunky integration of the payment system.

I don't see Authorize.net offering much more sophisticated control over the payment form - they only seem interested in constantly moving the controls on the merchant back-end (my opinion based on things having moved almost every time I go to login).... cosmetics just aren't a priority for THIS payment processor it seems.

hth

Greg Hewitt-Long

ps - at least in theory, it's going to be possible to END the table we're bound in, start a new one for a bordered payment page, end your table, then start up the authorize.net table again - turning the payment page into THREE tables to gain more control over the bordering of the table... that's a back-burner project for me...

[webyourbusiness]

it has recently come to our attention that Firefox is not working completely as we had hoped with this design fix - the problem appears to be something stopping the secure images loading from our server. If this happens, the payment page is being displayed, but unless you specify the height of the images in the header, the payment form can be a long way below the page crease - this has lead to several payments being abandoned...

Our solution - specify the image heights.... and if the images fail to load for any reason, the shopper should at least see the plain payment form in their browser window.


hth

Greg