How do you do it??

[Florian]

Hi all,

We have just changed over to Actinic Payments and have the following question:

I receive an order (we pre-authorise when order is placed and then charge when we ship) and, prior to shipping click the COMMIT button and also the sub-sequent COMMIT NOW button in Actinic.

The order status in Actinic then changes to 'Full Payment received' at that point. If I now check on the Payments Admin web page, in the 'Settled' column there is an orange questions mark (the 'Approved' column has a green tick). I guess this means that I haven't got confirmation that payment has actually happened.

I spoke to Actinic support and the rather hesitant lady told me that, due to batch updating I needed to wait until the next day for the 'Settled' column to be updated and show the correct state. She recommended to always hold off shipping until I have that confirmation. This means though that I will be sitting on the goods for another day before I can ship - not really acceptable for 'next day' orders.

Am I correct to assume that pressing the commit button in Actinic sends the payment instruction but I won't know until the next day whether the payment was successful?

How do you all handle this? Do you always wait until the next day before actually shipping the goods or just 'trust' that the 'Settled' column will show a green tick to signify that payment has been successful?

Please help - many thanks
Florian

[Darren B]

i never use pre-auth i charge immediately, this is classed as acceptable if you are intending on shipping in a short time frame, im sure i read in the streamline stuff once that they classed a short period of time as around 4 or 4 working days.

however the ? is replaced once the settlement has been made, this runs once a day normally the early hours of the morning

my advice if you shipping next day then dont use pre-auth

[Florian]

Thanks for this Darren.

Unfortunately, we do sometimes experience stock-outs as we source our web stock from our retail stores and Actinic doesn't have proper stock control (bring on v10!). Therefore, I would hate charging a customer and then not being able to fulfil on time. It's happened to me personally before on other sites and I guess I'm allergic to it because sometimes it took weeks for a refund to be done.

Our previous method was collecting CC details via Actinic and then putting them through manually in a PDQ terminal - slow, cumbersome, archaic and don't mention PCI DSS! Still, this gave us immediate feedback whether a transaction had gone through or not and Actinic Payments seems a step backwards from that - disappointingly so.

Florian

[cbarling]

Every PSP works in the same way, although terminology may vary. Authorisation is the process whereby the bank checks the card, makes sure there is enough money and reserves that money (sometimes known as a shadow). Settlement is the process of asking the bank to honour this by actually transferring the cash.

When you pre-authorise, what is asked of the bank is IDENTICAL to what is asked when you authorise, but the request for settlement won't be sent by the PSP to the bank until you commit it. In other words, the pre-authorise/commit process is simply about holding back the payment from settlement.

Settlement will happen seemlessly in the vast, vast majority of cases. In fact the green tick in Actinic Payments indicates that the payment has been successfully sent to the bank, not that it's been paid. This is a "feature" of the interface into the banking system (almost unbelievably) and is again the same across all PSPs.

You should ship the goods once you have committed the payment. It is highly unusual for there to be a subsequent problem with the payment, but if there is, you have to take it up with the bank. I will get a message back to the support team about this to clarify things.

When you were using a PDQ machine and it said the payment was OK, the payment was actually going through the same banking infrastructure behind the scanes. So you have already been shipping goods before you could be 100% sure that payment would be received. But you probably never experienced the bank not actually settling - which is what I mean by saying it is extremely rare and in practise you can ignore it.

I hope that helps - I do know that it's pretty complex and hard to understand. I only got to grips with what is happening behind the scenes myself a few months ago.

Chris

[Darren B]

When you were using a PDQ machine and it said the payment was OK, the payment was actually going through the same banking infrastructure behind the scanes. So you have already been shipping goods before you could be 100% sure that payment would be received. But you probably never experienced the bank not actually settling - which is what I mean by saying it is extremely rare and in practise you can ignore it.

This is a good point which is why you run your end of day on your machine "reconciliation/polling" what ever name your type of machine uses. This polls the banks asking them to take the funds from your days processing. Some machines do this automatically and people find a roll of paper on the machine i the morning some are manual (actually i think most are these day)

[Mike Hughes]

My machine is polled automatically every evening, leaving a nice print out ready in the morning. TBH I assumed they were all automatic.

Mike

[cbarling]

That's right. When you put a payment through a PDQ machine, it's the Authorisation stage. When you do the evening overnight batch from the PDQ machine, it's the Settlement stage.

For both PSPs and PDQ machines, you can Void a payment up until the Settlement stage. The effect of voiding is simply that the transaction will never be submitted for settlement, which is why it never appears on a buyers statement.

PSPs are effectively sophisticated PDQ machines. The communication they do with the bank works exactly the same way.

Chris

[PatchworkRabbit]

You learn so much on this forum

Stimulating lunchtime read.






Ok, stimulating is overstating it considerably, but it's still jolly interesting

[Florian]

Thanks for your clarification Chris, the way you explain it makes sense now.

As for our previous PDQ terminals, they were 'Online terminals', meaning that each and every transaction was transmitted as it happened. No more nightly polling or reconciling/banking of terminals at end of day was required.

We changed all our stores to an EPOS integrated solution with YesPay a while ago but Actinic was only moved over to AP the other day.

Thanks again everybody for your help with this, we'll now start shipping when committing payments in Actinic.
Cheers

[acompton]

Florian,

If I go to the information pages on your website, the SHOP ONLINE button is a broken link (has the wong url).

[Florian]

Florian,

If I go to the information pages on your website, the SHOP ONLINE button is a broken link (has the wong url).

Ah, thanks very much Alan, thought we had fixed that one a while ago - better have a serious word with quality control (me!)