Integrating Nochex

[wjcampbe]

I think that you, (are you newcomer to forums and the web?), may be reading an attitude that is not there.

Step back and re-read every post you have made - then discuss attitude.

[caite]

It's interesting what you say about Nochex Jo. After some consideration I decided to go with Nochex as my sole method of credit card processing - so it is pretty important to me.

My reasoning was that I've started a very small scale business selling craft goods - so I'm only looking at relatively small turnover and can't afford things like merchant accounts at this stage. I initially intended to use paypal as I already use it for personal shopping on ebay and I felt a big name brand had advantages with trust. However I found them positively obstructive to setting up a separate account for a business. While surfing around for solutions I quickly discovered many many people who have problems with paypal and adding that to the problems I was already having, I was put off. On investigating my options I decided nochex was the closest alternative in style, but found mostly positive feedback about them from users.

They don't require users to set up an account unless you are processing single transactions over £100, which I am extremely unlikely to need. And the interface is very simple and clear for people who may not be very experienced in internet shopping - which is a consideration in my line of business. And for me, this isn't losing me money, the payment side of things works fine - it's just the administration end where life is being made more difficult.

And the ex-union rep in me can't help looking on it that I found posts on this forum going back 2 years from people with the same problem, but no solution. If we can find a definitive answer and get it in black and white on this thread, then people in the future will be able to search the forums and immediately know what to do to get the integration working. It's all for the greater good!

[Buzby]

Caite,

I started off using Nochex and then added other various methods. When I added Paypal my sales were split Nochex 20% Paypal 80%.

Last year I took on Protx with a merchant account and my sales instantly went up. sales are now split Protx 65% Paypal 35% Nochex 3 transactions this year (less than 1%)

For the trouble incurred with Nochex I would suggest switching to Paypal as it has brand awareness. Clients at least feel that it is secure as they are not handing their card details to you.

Kind regards

Jason

[Buzby]

Pete,

With respect to lost trade, you don't have to close the site.

You can still receive orders, you just have to manually reconcile them. I know that this is not the solution but it does mean that you do not have to lose money whilst you are searching for a solution.

As mentioned above, is Nochex worth the trouble regardless of who is at fault?

Kind regards

Jason

[pinbrook]

I would always suggest using both Paypal and Nochex.

It doesn't cost anything to set paypal up. But as others have indicated neither of these payment methods are going to allow your business to grow. Buzby's experience is fairly typical, use a decent CC processor and you will convert more sales. I will always advise people to use a "proper" credit card processor such as protx, Worldpay or simple download of CC details with SSL.

I understand that when starting up you have to restrict spending to much before proving to yourself the site will sell, but there is then a point at which you have to say, ok, nochex and paypal are holding the site back.

I know we are digressing from the original post which is centred around geting Nochex to work, and as I previously indicated, I am sure that Actinic will provide a solution but it may not be today or tomorrow... thus it is prudent to take your own steps to alieviate the situation

[caite]

The problem I had with paypal was that I couldn't open a business account with them unless I had a business bank account - which I don't see the point of yet. Which wasn't a problem in itself because I could open a personal account instead - however because I already have a personal account with them I ran into problems because they are not designed to let people operate two accounts at once. I was not willing to run my business through my personal paypal account, so I can keep my finances clearly delineated. There may be a solution, but Paypal customer services are even more impenetrable than nochex!

For now I'm happy to stick with Nochex if we can just get this working. I've taken care to add plenty of hand-holding text into the switch over page to reassure people about the security, and I've yet to lose anyone at that point.

[petesouthwest]

Maybe your right, Actinic’s lack of response to my questions is frustrating me, stopping me from making informed business decisions that means I’m loosing money. Unlike anyone else involved I have been working from 6am to midnight every day since Saturday trying to understand where the problem is.

But lets take a step back.

We are a small business in our first year of trading. Like most businesses, the first year has not produced a huge profit and so we run on a shoe string, hoping good products and customer service will make us successful. There has been a steady increase in turnover to the point where we needed to upgrade in order to cope with the quantity of orders we have been receiving, but we have got limited cash to fund this upgrade. Upgrading is thus a big step, and commitment.

Like Caite Nochex suited us and has been very good to the point where we have a merchant account with them which can handle part refunds (very useful). Offering lots of payment providers would just confuse our customers and is totally unnecessary. Note: Jo- If you only shop from companies offing you a choice of payment provider your online shopping experience obviously doesn’t encompass any company doing their own processing! No Amazon, no Ebuyer, No Scan the list is endless.

Anyway….
Before deciding to purchase Actinic we looked at their website for requirements; it says ‘Perl 5.004 or later; MD5 Perl module recommended’

We emailed our host, who have been very good in the past, telling them the requirements, and asking them if there would therefore be any problems with Actinic and Nochex. There response was that if all that is required is Perl 5.004 or later; MD5 Perl module recommended’ it will work fine.

As Actinic have not been answering our questions all week, we have been working on the assumption the problem could be fixed, and we hoped with something simple. We did naively assume Actinic support staff knew how their software works. To have changed PSP or host without knowing the cause of the problem would have been rash, and could have resulted in more time and money being lost.

As it stands It WOULD have resulted in wasted time as we would have simply swapped to another host that gave us ‘Perl 5.004 or later; MD5 Perl module recommended’.

Saturday and Sunday
Not releasing we could raise an email ticket with Actinic we posted here, and emailed Nochex on Saturday regarding integration.

Nochex replied asking for our responder URL. Searched Forum, not much luck on responderurl only others getting stuck and no answers.

Monday
With no satisfactory answers we discovered we could email Actinic and raised a ticket at 2:00pm on the 31st July asking about this problem.

At 20:40 on the 31st we were emailed with our responder url although told that integration did not require it.
We replied saying we still were having problems.


Tuesday 1st
At 18:19 1st aug we were emailed by Actinic to say the responder url is generated into the PSP bounce page so we don’t need to set the APC details / url field, just set APC on.

We emailed to say it still didn’t work

At 01-Aug-2006, 11:44 PM I posted on the Actinic forum with a hypothesis that the host could be the problem. Actinic neither agreed nor disagreed.

Wednesday 2nd
In morning, In order to try and understand what was going wrong I started learn to program in Perl and used an adapted 3rd party script to test the Nochex APC function. It FAILED. I managed to get Nochex Technical department to phone me and after some experimentations, in their opinion, they said the test script was failing as my host did not support SLL.

At 11.06 on the 2nd I emailed Actinic asking whether SSL needed to be supported due to what Nochex had said and what I had found. No answer.

At 2:42 Actinic emailed asking for my contact number in Nochex. I have a contact number simply because we have a merchant account with them.

At 03:41 PM I posted on the Actinic forum asking whether my host needed to have SSL support. At 05:45 PM the Actinic response was no. (cdicken)

At, 06:43 PM I posted asking if they could explain why the answer was ‘no’, as from my understanding it was needed.

Thursday
At 11:28 we emailed to ask if Actinc could give me an update. No reply

We then read on the forum that Actinic needed our server’s access logs, these were sent at 2:40.

But At 2:39 we were told by Actinic by email that there might be a problem with our hosts firewall settings. And asked for the logs that we had already sent (they would have crossed in the ether)

I analysed the logs myself to find that the Nochex server 62.105.93.124 had been attempting to reach the os000001.pl script.

At 05:52 PM I get a proper answer to my post concerning how the APC works (Tamas Viola)

At 5:53 Actinic reply by email saying that according to the error logs there are no errors recorded, so the problem is probably with the server and can we get SSH access to the server for Actinic or give them our network settings.

I dig into the scripts mentioned in the post from Tamas Viola, to find references to port 443 (an SSL port) and posts to HTTPS that in my opinion, and the opinion of Nochex, and the opinion of several independent people, require SSL support. But of course Actinic could be more clever than me and have found a way around that, so…

At 6:23 we emailed to ask them to confirm whether SSL support via a perl module like crypt::SSLeay was required or whether port 443 needed to be open. No reply


At 07:44 PM I post what I have found and ask if it is still possible that SSL support is not needed and if not to explain it to me. No answer as yet at 21:54.

While all of this has been happening we have also been investigating other options:
Move to a different PSP
Great in principle, however we have had a merchant account Nochex which allows us to accept payments from customers WITHOUT the customer having a Nochex account for ANY amount of money. Swapping to someone like Protx would require a merchant account from a bank which would take several weeks to set up. Checking other alternatives all produced the same response, fill out a form and it will take a couple weeks/days. Remember, 1) while our site is offline we are LOOSING money! And 2)Which provider could we guarantee would work?

Move to a different Host
Hmmm but what would we ask them? I still have not had a satisfactory answer from Actinic regarding the SSL support. Do we invest more money in SSL support when Actinic say its not required? Or believe Nochex and do it anyway? The problem is that 1) As I understand it no host can guarantee they will set up our site in 24 hours as it requires our current host to transfer our IPTAGS to the new host. How quick will our current host respond? Why should they respond quickly when it means they are loosing our custom not gaining it?
2) Even when the new site is up and running in order for our customers to access the site it will require the new IP address to propagate around the DNS servers. This time is not predictable or guarantee-able.

Manually reconcile orders
This takes AGES and is the reason we have upgraded. The paper work backs up, as we don’t have enough time in the day to deal with orders and paper work, thus we will have to get back on top of it before we go live as we are integrating Actinic with our accounts package to reduce the work involved and to control stock. Also if we let customers use our website, how would we test any solutions offered to us? Customers would soon loose confidence if our site is ‘on and off’ due to us testing suggested changes.

So at the back of our mind all the time is that the fastest way for our site to get back up and running is with our existing PSP and HOST. As Actinic have yet to confirm that SSL is required there is always the possibility that I have not understood something and it will all magically start working.

However as we don’t really believe this we are emailing other hosts like mad asking about ‘up times’ and whether they can support SSL and have port 443 open.

And I’m sitting here at 22:35 still checking emails and posts, still waiting to hear why Actinic does not need SSL support, writing this reply, because Jo thinks that some of this problem is my fault and others think I have a bad attitude?

All we wanted was the ‘seamless integration’ that both companies say they offer. Now all we want is to know EXACTLY what the requirements are to run Actinic with Nochex

With hindsight, after days of searching this forum and finding this problem being initially posted on 05-Oct-2004, 03:34 PM with no answer, and emailing the other people, who asked the same questions, only to find that Actinic seemed unable to help them too, the whole idea now seems flawed. But then hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Sorry if this all sounds harsh, its not that I'm new to the web, forums or anything else, its just been another 18 hour day sat in front of this PC trying to make the £800 software we bought work as it says it should on the box.

I do of course appreciate all the people who just post on here to help others.

Pete

[pinbrook]

It's interesting what you say about Nochex Jo.

I just have an aversion to buying from websites that fail certain credibility tests. Additionally as a web developer I feel it necessary to discuss these reservations with my clients, as some people still have the belief that all you have to do is build a site and people will buy from you. There are many factors that go together to building a sucessful ecommerce site, the web is a very competitive environment, thus any site has to ensure it has all the tick boxes ticked with as few negative vibes as possible. To me using paypal/nochex as the sole payment method is a negative.

My views on sites that only take paypal are well documented, these views also extend to nochex, as they can be sites that have been set up without a solid businesss plan or business funding. They can also indicate that the website is not a trading sucess as it isn't generating sufficient turnover to afford to pay for a PSP. Some of these business can be genuine traders dipping their toes in to the water, others can be indicitive of here today gone tomorrow merchants.

I also tend to avoid sites that use SSL only - if its a company I've not heard of - whilst these businesses are probably more established (exsisting bricks and mortar shop with merchant acct) there is still a risk that my credit card detail will not be held in a secure manner on the shops PC.

I prefer to deal on the web with well known names or websites that use a PSP. I regard these sites more likely to keep my credit card detail in a safe environment. Hence I do buy from Amazon, Ebuyer etc. Smaller companies using a PSP offer the fallback of a chargeback with the PSP if it all goes pearshaped and the goodfail to arrive.

Note my criteria for buying is based firstly on how I perceive my CC detail will be kept secure, before examining the credibility of a site to decide whether I am going to trust the website to send my goods.

[wjcampbe]

Pete,

Everyone understands your frustration, but you are thrashing around making a lot of waves, but not really going anywhere. As we are all finding out by calmly watching this unfold, there are several factors involved.

Nochex offer multiple layer accounts (Seller, Seller Plus and Merchant to name just three) and some of these may have been introduced AFTER Nochex wrote their integration script (yes, it talks to Actinic osxxxxxx.pl, but the part that talks to Nochex servers is written by Nochex)

Actinic and Nochex are both aware of the problem and are talking to each other, but neither one is going to rush into a solution that works for you, but breaks every working installation that is already out there.

Already your host has made some changes, and may need to make more before the story is over.

It might be that Nochex have to patch their script or Actinic make a change (though this second is highly unlikely - apart from including any Nochex changes in future distributions).

You decided to stick with the host and payment provider you know, and blame the software that is fairly new to you - that is your business decision to make, but the responsibility for that decision and its consequences are also yours.

There is also confusion and danger in much of what you are trying to do in your eagerness to get up and running. SSL on YOUR site should certainly not be an essential to short and infrequent bursts of communication between your site and the payment provider. Protx and all the others also use https (SSL) addresses to host their side of their integrations without needing SSL on the merchant's site.

I expect that either your host will have to install a common perl module, change a standard permission, or permit an additional protocol, or an unusual requirement of the particular account type you are using with Nochex will turn out to break their own integration script and they will have to repair it.

In the meantime, to reduce your frustrations while these guys work on the whole solution (that works for you and the people who already have a successful install), is there something else that can be done on the site that you can focus on? Maybe writing a few articles for future publication as a promotion, add to the online FAQs - change a few meta descriptions and keywords to spread the SEO penetration of the site, plan a couple of adwords campaigns?

[pinbrook]

Pete

you may find this thread an interesting read,as it documents a similar issue we had with Paypal. The problem itself was not caused by actinic, but the simplest resolution was for actinic to provide a small workaround which only affected people need to apply.

http://community.actinic.com/showthr...ghlight=paypal

Note the time scale and the different experiences of different people. Whilst it was a major irritant it was not a show stopper as most people had an alternative payment method. People were sufficiently patient to know the problem was being addressed and waited for the resolution.


This should give you a better idea of the full breadth of the problem posed and why an instant resolution may not be forthcoming.

[cbarling]

Hi Pete and Caite,

Thought that it was worth commenting here. I would like to talk generally, not to provide excuses but to explain the problems that we face.

This is the sort of issue that is a complete nightmare for us, as it us for you. Let me explain why. For these types of issue, there are always at least six possible causes - our software has a bug, the payment service software has a bug, the web server has some unusual configuration, the user has mis-configured things, or the payment service provider has changed things / introduced new capabilities and we didn't know about it. Even standard software can be changed and cause problems (e.g. new releases of Apache, IIS, Norton, Internet Explorer etc).

Issues similar to this arise all of the time, and most of the time the explanation is to do with the web host or user configuration (I'm not saying that this is the case here). They are usually sorted out fairly quickly. Occasionally, they are never sorted. From our side, that's when we have reached the point where we have done everything that we can. There are lot's of things that are out of our control so we can't guarantee 100% resolution.

Looking at this particular case, the Nochex integration was done by Nochex and tested by us before being included in the software. I personally wasn't aware that Nochex enabled people to take credit cards in the way that you are doing, so I suspect that this has been introduced since the original integration. When we issue new releases (major and maintenence) we do test the payment service interfaces, but of course we don't test new capability which we don't even know about. This needs to be bottomed out to see if the problem is that this particular usage has never been programmed in.

Please don't assume that no-one cares, either in Actinic or on the community, or indeed at Nochex. You've been unlucky enough to hit one of the more difficult problems. An issue with Paypal took absolutely ages to solve and from my memory turned out to be because Paypal very occasionally sent its responses back in a different order than that it usually did. It always sent them in one particular order when we tested it, so we could never reproduce the problem.

By the way, the reason why you had to provide us with a telephone number for Nochex (thanks for that) was because when we tried the number that we had, it no longer worked, and no number seemed to be available on their site.

Tamas Viola is now looking into this. He's the best person we have in Actinic for these types of issues.

Chris
CEO, Actinic

[TraceyHand]

oh I see, that explains the attitude.
I wonder if she talks to her own customers like that?

No, I can vouch for the fact Jo doesn't!

I suppose the point she was trying to make is that, while Actinic are working to try to resolve this issue, they cannot drop everything just to solve it.

The level of (free) support you have received so far is not to be sniffed at! You haven't had the same level of consideration and support from either Nochex OR your hosting company so your attack probably oughtn't be aimed at the people (be that the forum members of Actinic) who ARE trying to help out here.

Just my 2ps worth anyway

[Bruce]

Pete,

Could you please confirm that port 443 does not need to be open and we do not need to have crypt::SSLeay installed?

None of the above is needed for the proper operation of Actinic or Nochex PSP integration. SSL is not required on the server by Actinic. The callbacks from the PSP server use HTTP as they are merely confirming the transaction and not returning any confidential data.

I don't know whether we can get SSH settings, it takes several hours for our hosting company to get back to us.

Can we have the network settings file at least in this case. You can mail it to me at bksupport at actinic.co.uk .

Regards,

[petesouthwest]

Pete,


None of the above is needed for the proper operation of Actinic or Nochex PSP integration. SSL is not required on the server by Actinic. The callbacks from the PSP server use HTTP as they are merely confirming the transaction and not returning any confidential data.

Can we have the network settings file at least in this case. You can mail it to me at bksupport at actinic.co.uk .

Regards,

Hi Bruce
I appreciate your reply. We cant give you our server details at the moment as we are in the process of changing host, to one that offers us SSL support.

I'm sorry to be argumentative but I still believe your mistaken, in terms of what i have posted here:
http://community.actinic.com/showthr...t=22625&page=2

Can you explain why I'm wrong?

I know that confidential data is not being sent, I believe that is the issue that is confusing most people, but from what I can see the acknowledgment is being sent to a HTTPS site and thus needs SSL support. From my understanding the code is even saying to send the data on port 443.Unless their is something being done that I dont understand? I'm more than happy to be wrong because I just want my site up and running again.

I did reply to the email yesturday asking whether anyone had tested Actinc and Nochex on a LINUX server that has not had crypt::SSLeay installed and has port 443 closed.

I'm in the process of setting one up now but it will be a while before I can comment.

BTW Jo- I posted for a very cheap host to get a another host without SSL support to test actinic&nochex, not to run my business. I wanted it cheap as I had no intention of doing anything with it after testing.



Pete

[petesouthwest]

You haven't had the same level of consideration and support from either Nochex OR your hosting company

Nochex have phoned me 3 times, I have managed to speak on the phone to technical people twice, I now have 2 phone numbers for them, this has all been free. My host responds to my questions normally within the hour, to be fair sometimes my host has shown a worrying lack of understanding, but they have replied allowing us to explain exactly what we feel we need.

I'm not anti actinic, and i think this is sad that its turning into Pete VS the Actinic forum, but if people are unjustly going to try and make me feel responcible then I naturally defend myself. Chris the Actinic CEO has posted an honest and appreciated post, for which I will reply shortly. But many others have unnecessarily got upset and defensive because I have dared to suggest that Actinic customer services could do better. Unless I am mistaken, most people who post on here are not Actinic staff, just people wanting to help. So why should they feel the need to defend Actinic for not answering my questions?

Pete