Paypal and Actinic Payments

[justinhill]

Until today, we accepted card payments using Paypal Website Payments Pro. This meant that we also had the paypal 'logo' button on checkout page 1 allowing people to pay using their paypal account. Some buyers used this option.

Now that we have brought up Actinic Payments, we have removed the Paypal Website Payments Pro method. This means the paypal button to pay using a paypal account has also disappeared. We were not expecting this.

The suggestion from Actinic support is that you can't have one without the other. Really? I don't want to use Paypal for card payments; it's not safe enough. But I would like to retain the option for paypal users to pay using their paypal account. Does anyone know if I can do this? (Catalog 10 by the way)

[Duncan Rounding]

Add Paypal Website Payments (standard) as a secondary payment option perhaps. It would still be possible for someone to pay using a card at the Paypal site but much less likely because of it being second on list. You could also change the wording to be 'Paypal account payment' or similar for the Paypal payment option.

[cbarling]

Yes, I would suggest setting the descriptions as:

- Credit or debit card
- Paypal

You should then get a very, very small percentage going to Paypal and then paying by card.

Chris

[justinhill]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I had been hoping to retain the blue paypal button at the bottom of checkout page 1.

[justinhill]

Also I have to say I wish I'd done a bit more research before doing this. I assumed Actinic Payments would be integrated with Actinic Catalog. With Paypal Website Payments Pro the card details are being taken right there on the checkout page, all neat and tidy. With Actinic Payments the buyer is whisked off to another page, on another web site, with a different look and feel and an 'Actinic Payments' banner on it. To my eyes my website looks a lot more small-time than it did before.

Yes, I know there's some degree of customisation possible with the Actinic Payments page and I'm reading up on that now. Nevertheless I wish I'd asked the right question at the time. Also, if the buyer presses cancel on the payment page I still get an order (pending psp) whereas with the previous system nothing happened. In fact, if I keep going between the checkout page and the payment page I get a new order each time so if a buyer gets as far as the payment page, realises he's forgotten to add something, goes back and adds it then completes checkout I have two orders, one paid, one not.

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Justin,

If I were you I wouldn't be too regretful on this. All PSPs have to take you off to their site as the PCI-DSS security requirements for handling card data are so high that it's pretty much the only practical way to do things now. Paypal Pro was not PCI compliant so there are major issues to using it.

In terms of other card options not creating an order unless it was paid for, I can't say for sure with Paypal Pro but I do know that previously Actinic's own page card capure schemes did create the order for failed payments but then discarded it so it didn't download. This led to missing order numbers which can be quite frustrating for the taxman and lead to questions along the lines of 'where's the details for order xxxxx00642? I can see them for 641 and 643, why aren't they here?". Did you suffer from this at all?

Mike

[cbarling]

I understand what you're saying. Having acknowledged that, I haven't heard of anybody reporting a drop in orders with Actinic Payments, and we have some pretty large businesses using it nowadays.

I know I'm an industry insider, but I would 100% prefer to put my card details into a third party site that has the full green bar indicating the highest security level, as I know the certificate providers check out the companies in question. The thing is, these views tend to spread out to the general population over time.

So I would customise the Actinic Payments page to suit the rest of your site. Then you should find no change in order volumes, but have the comforting knowledge that you aren't capturing any card details that could lead to nasty attacks and you're compliant with the highest security standards.

Chris

[justinhill]

With apologies for pushing this thread even further away from the original subject, I'm not sure being taken off-site is either common or normal - for 'big league' sites at any rate. For instance just now I had to make a top-up of our Royal Mail Smartstamp account. Paid with my card and did the 3D secure thing, all on site and without their page layout being compromised in any way (3D secure appeared in a rectangle pre-prepared for it on the page).

Give me some time and I'll think of others where I pay using the card and get the whole experience on one site.

Actually I don't yet know what the 3D secure is going to look like because with my test transactions I'm not being asked for it (despite our card being enrolled). I must have got some part of the config wrong.

As for the duplicate orders thing, because the card details are right there on checkout page 3 with paypal website payments pro the buyer has entered everything before he presses the button to complete the order. With Actinic Payments the buyer has to complete the order before he has started entering his payment details. If the buyer has to resume his purchase later because he realises he doesn't have the card with him, there's gonna be two orders.

[justinhill]

lead to questions along the lines of 'where's the details for order xxxxx00642? I can see them for 641 and 643, why aren't they here?". Did you suffer from this at all?

Mike

Mike, we have yet to be inspected but I'm sure there'll be fun and games when the time comes. We may not work the same way you do; as soon as an order comes in we print the invoice and re-key it into our accounts system (are we mad?) so Actinic doesn't exist as far as our book-keeping goes, and we have consecutive invoices (orders coming from three sources; eBay, Amazon and Actinic).

[cbarling]

I think this is the point. I don't mind putting my details into the Royal Mail's web site but I'm suspicious of the one man courier trying to look like the Royal Mail.

The comnpany's I know that have done PCI compliance properly at their own sites have spent between £40k and £250k on achieving this. They are big companies (in most cases, but one was a PSP) so they can afford it. The rest of us can't. So it's good for us and it's good for the industry that buyers go to properly secured sites.

Chris

[justinhill]

I just received an email from Paypal inviting me, as a Website Payments Pro user, to sign up for 3-D Secure support!

[justinhill]

I think this is the point. I don't mind putting my details into the Royal Mail's web site but I'm suspicious of the one man courier trying to look like the Royal Mail.

The comnpany's I know that have done PCI compliance properlyat their onw sites have spent between £40k and £250k on achieving this. They are big companies (in most cases, but one wsa a PSP) so they can afford it. The rest of us can't. So it's good for us and it's good for the industry that buyers go to properly secured sites.

Chris

Chris, absolutely and I shouldn't be carping about it. Of course the key elements here are customer confidence and seller security against fraud. Ages ago it seems now we decided we needed to move away from Paypal and looked at all the alternatives listed in the payment methods dialog. We decided to go with Actinic payments because we thought that of all the choices this would be bound to be the best-integrated option. Maybe it's the second best-integrated option.

[leehack]

You're looking at thoroughbreds and old nags and trying to compare them. I wholeheartedly agree that the big boys pave the way and if at all possible you should follow their lead, but that has to be seasoned with a sense of reality. The buying power, infrastructure and shear spending ability of these sites is simply unmatchable. Amazon last Christmas IIRC were taking a million pound a minute, you can checkout within their site, but realistically how can one compare or compete with that?

Small businesses need to focus on what they are good at, otherwise they end up chasing something they will never achieve and leave much behind that should have been theirs. My most successful build takes around 150 orders a day, turnsover multimillions a year, every single one of those customers goes off site to pay, so it clearly cannot be an issue given their growth and success. It's by no means an isolated occurrence either.

Gotta be realistic, if i'm training for the London Marathon, if i set Paula Radcliffe as my aim, i am always going to feel second best, however hard i try.

[justinhill]

Thanks all of you for talking about this. I'm committed. I'm sticking with it. I've started another thread soliciting advice and reassurance about customising the payment page to look a bit more like it's ours. I'll probably start yet another thread asking about why 3D secure isn't happening.