Custom Payment Method

I am after some advice on creating an enhancement to Actinic as for some bizarre reason Actinic does not currently support the purchase and redemption of vouchers(coupons are a different concept).

Allowing users to purchase vouchers is not really a problem as it is easy enough to create a generic product that can act as a voucher and therefore be purchased through the normal methods. Each time an order for a voucher is received a voucher code can be generated and inserted into a database as part of the fulfilment process.

My client is currently using the secure trading payment method. What I want to do is intercept the checkout at a chosen point and take them to a custom page. On this custom page I would ask the user for their voucher code which would be queried against a database for its validity. If a valid voucher code has been provided the value of the voucher will be dedeucted from the shopping cart total and the user will be returned back to the standard checkout process.

My problem being how do I inform the catalog of this adjustment to the order ??

Any help, advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Simon

[TraceyG]

Hi,

If you have knowledge of perl then you could take a look at the OrderScript.pl file which is the one that is run during the checkout process. I'm afraid that this would require a lot of customisation to get it to work and we could not provide any support for this.

[CreativeNRG]

Custom Payment Method

Maybe you can correct me but inside of the site directory in a folder called 'CommonOCC' i see a number of the payment processors. I don't know Perl but I do have programming experience and I was thinking that I could perhaps create a custom payment process like OCCSecureTradingScriptTemplate.pl which forks off to the page I want and then from there I do what I need to do and then send them on their way along the route they would have taken, i.e. to the Secure Trading payment pages.

Simon

[TraceyG]

Hi,

For a PSP to integrate fully with Actinic they need to purchase a PSP Toolkit from us, which gives intructions on what to do. I believe that you would require a knowledge of Perl though. If you want further information about this then you would need to contact our Sales team on 0845 129 4800.

However, I don't think that this is exactly what you want to do. If I understand correctly, you want to start the checkout process and then break from it to go to a custom page where the customer can enter a voucher code to give a discount and then return to our checkout process. So you would need to have knowledge of perl to edit our scripts and create your own that would interact with our scripts.

[CreativeNRG]

Ok, so what scripts would I need to modify and where can I try and find some help to achieve this. I am surprised that it is something Actinic have never thought of, the ability to purchase and redeem shopping vouchers. I am happy to get someone who knows perl to do this but I need to have an understanding of what is involved first.

[TraceyG]

As I said before OrderScript.pl is the checkout script so this will have to be amended to capture your voucher discount. It would depend on where in the process you would want to break out of checkout as to what exactly would need to change and if any other scripts would need amending. I'm afraid that the changes would be too great for us to Support.

[CreativeNRG]

Why is there no support for Vouchers ?

Can i ask why there is no built-in support for vouchers. It is not an uncommon feature of online or offline shops to sell redeemable vouchers ? Is there any planned support for vouchers in the future ?

Simon

[cdicken]

Can i ask why there is no built-in support for vouchers. It is not an uncommon feature of online or offline shops to sell redeemable vouchers ? Is there any planned support for vouchers in the future ?

Vouchers are actually a tricky thing to implement as you have to somehow keep track of when a unique voucher has been used, and ensure it cannot be used again on the site. I acknowledge they are a common ecommerce feature, but they are not in the software yet as we have not written support for them yet

You won't see them in the next major version of Actinic, but hopefully you'll see them after that.

[CreativeNRG]

It's surely not rocket science and does not fill me with confidence that even the original software developers are struggling with it and even by version 7 of their product are unable to achieve it. It is starting to swing my client towards an alternative product now instead of investing any further money in upgrades particularly now that you have told me it won't be appearing in the next version.