Customising Actinic Payments page

[justinhill]

I've downloaded the pdf about customising this page but I'm a bit nervous about it. How far can I go (including stupid mistakes) without breaking the thing or stopping people being able to complete? And, how much am I allowed to change - for example, can I remove the 'Actinic Payments' graphic altogether? And would this be a good idea?

I'm still at the bewildered stage at the moment.

[Duncan Rounding]

If you download the zip file you will see all the parts that can be changed. Basically you can change the graphics and the css file but not the code itself so you are 'safe'.

[Mike Hughes]

I think the key thing with using a PSP is customer confidence and making it a seamless user experience so they don't experience any doubts.

I guess in an ideal world therefor we want the page/process to say:

1. This is MY payment page. Same branding, colours, logo, etc.
2. Yes, we host it on a fully secure service provided by ....

Which is different to how I've tended to view this before where the approach I've taken is 'We'll now pass you to our PSP to take your payment".

So I guess the implications are that yes, you should drop or minimise the AP branding as we really only want to be presenting our own presence and that of CreditCall (or their public face) who are the PCI certified authority.

An interesting point for discussion though. I doubt if I get more than 1-2% drop out rates at the payment stage*.

Mike

*
a) One of the advantages of seeing orders that aren't paid for is that you know how many exist. Much better to my mind than not knowing about them.

b) These are my final drop out rates. I follow up any orders that appear without a payment by email and this usually seems to recover 80-90% of these. Most emails get a reply from the customer telling me they'd wanted to change their order or had experienced a technical problem.

[Duncan Rounding]

Has anyone got a customised AP page that they can show?
It would be good to show what can be done.

[plantsforshade]

Hi

It may be worth looking at the stinkyink payment pages as they have been significantly changed to their own brand.

Nigel

[Mike Hughes]

If anybody does look at examples on other sites can they do a screen print and post it back here? It seems a more friendly approach than us all going and placing test orders on someone's live site.

Mike

[leehack]

Stinky Inks is deffo the best i've seen, although their checkout is painfully slow with the SSL included, another bum point for SSL, my god i hate SSL so much.

[justinhill]

I'm tied up in town at the moment so haven't looked further at the customisation thing - but I'm grateful for all the comments. In another thread, Chris pointed out that I would have to spend up to 250k to have my own compliant checkout but overnight it occurred to me that this isn't quite the point I was making.

Actinic wrote Actinic Catalog and that program generates all the css and html for my site. Given that Actinic also wrote the Actinic Payments page (within the limits imposed by compliance) I would have thought that the config for Actinic Payments method in Catalog could have included the ability to upload css etc to make the payment page as similar to the rest of the site as possible. Anyway, why isn't it possible for the whole of the payments page to be a frame surrounded by the same header, left column etc. that the site itself has? Or is this a compliance issue?

[leehack]

To do that, the hosting for the site would need to pass stringent testing, as actinic can work on a variety of packages, i'm not sure how actinic could ever qualify that, these guidelines came out 3+ years ago and still we have loads of people lax and failing to do anything in this area, it simply has to pushed and enforced. If payment is made in one place, it is very easy to set that one single place up to qualify for all security checks. Your argument is that 10,000 people running actinic sites could all have their own compliant settings, thats just not realistic on all counts.

Think of it this way:

Do you have a doctors surgery or a dentist per street or do you have one for an area, it's too darn complicated and expensive and fraught with danger to split out to the extent you are looking to do.

[justinhill]

I didn't mean make the payment process run on the web shop's server, I meant have duplicates of the web shop layout uploaded to the payments server, kinda like a 'skin'.

But even assuming this is impossible or completely impractical I would still have thought that the css customisation/image replacement that is already offered for the payments page could be incorporated into Catalog, so you can maintain it with 'design mode' etc. and press a button to upload the layout to the Actinic Payments server whenever you change it. Actinic would know what is changeable without breaking the compliance and would make sure Catalog only allowed/sent those changes.

[Duncan Rounding]

Secure Trading allow you to upload html, images and css to their server Here's a simple page that I customised for a client recently based upon the store pages.

[leehack]

I hear where you're coming from, in reality you do not want the skin though, nor would you want the 3 columns like most ecommerce sites have, you're basically looking to take the logo at the top and then turn the 3 column site underneath into one large container.

I can see the benefit of applying a separate skin that you've designed, but getting actinic to create that from what you use normally would be practically impossible. Likewise the integration to be written to do this within the software would take quite some time.

Couple of things to bear in mind - actinic payments is a relatively new service, about 3 years old now, it can certainly improve and no doubt will, also in 3 years you're the guy that has been most vocal on wanting/needing this, so you have to bear in mind that they need to build the mass required functions far more than sporadic requests on one of the many payment services.

The stinky ink page shows how far it can be taken, its true it could be easier to do, its just not important enough to get that sort of time devoted to it.

[Mike Hughes]

I think Justin's making a very valid point that if we assume a retailer branded payment page will work better than an AP branded page, shouldn't Actinic customise the page by default rather than us having to hand craft it.

I do though think this would be very difficult to do well. As Duncan shows with the example above. The payment page should have the same look as the website but with the removal of anything that might distract the customer or get them to click away from the payment page. i.e. There should be no navigation to sections, newletter signups, cart buttons, etc.

Trying to do this automatically could look like dogs dinner if not done well. On the other hand, a generic, retailer branded page (i.e. with the right colour scheme, contact details, logo, etc) shouldn't be too difficult for Actinic to generate as an option.

Mike

[leehack]

They could adopt a similar approach as they do to the receipt page, where its a stripped down layout, with maybe logo up top and container underneath, they certainly couldn't auto do it from the overall layout.

How that then sends it off to AP is the issue and the time taken to write that, just doesn't sound viable to me, although i agree something to think about as it progresses. Giving the software direct access to the payment page design module just sounds problematic to me.

[Duncan Rounding]

It would be great to see the AP pages available as a Page Type in Design View.