Pre-authorized (PSP) with PayPal?

[Air-Tech]

Late last week PayPal PDT was enabled on our PayPal account & set up in Sellerdeck, but since then we have received a few PayPal payments that have been marked a "Pre-Authorised (PSP)" in Sellerdeck. These payments look just like any other completed payment in PayPal, but a manual entry is required in Sellerdeck to fully complete the order.

Both our standard PayPal & Express payments methods are configured in Sellerdeck to "charge transactions immediately" & there have been no changes that I'm aware of other than entering the PDT token into the relevant payment methods.

Any Ideas?


Thanks.

[Mike Hughes]

I had to look up PayPal PDT to understand what it is. Is there a reason why you implemented PDT and is it now built into sellerdeck?

From Paypal:

Payment Data Transfer (PDT) - An Alternative to IPN

PayPal's PDT system sends order confirmations to merchant sites that use PayPal payments buttons (PayPal Payments Standard) and lets them authenticate this information. Such sites can then display this data locally in an order confirmation page.


When to Use PDT?
IPN provides the same capabilities described above. So, when should you choose PDT instead of IPN?

With PDT, your site is notified immediately when a customer completes payment. With IPN, however, there is a material lag between the time a customer completes payment and the time your site receives notification of this event.

So, use PDT if your site includes a feature that requires immediate payment notification.

For example, consider a digital music store. With PDT, this store can let customers download their purchases right away since PDT sends order confirmations immediately. With IPN, such immediate order fulfillment is not possible.


Advantages of IPN
PDT has a a major weakness: it sends order confirmations once and only once. As a result, when PDT sends a confirmation, your site must be running; otherwise, it will never receive the message.

With IPN, in contrast, delivery of order confirmations is virtually guaranteed since IPN resends a confirmation until your site acknowledges receipt. For this reason, PayPal recommends that you implement IPN rather than PDT.

Another advantage of IPN is that it sends many types of notifications, while PDT sends just order confirmations. So, using IPN, your site can receive, for example, chargeback notifications as well as order confirmations.

Note: If your site must be notified of payments immediately, you can implement both IPN and PDT. However, if you do, your site will receive two order confirmations for each sale. As a result, you must be careful to take action (say, ship a product) on just one copy of a given confirmation message.

[zgap111]

We've been having Paypal Receipts marked as "PSP Pending" for quite some time now...

It's quite bad - our customers call us up chasing and we don't know it was paid...

Our experience is the opposite...

It's really bad when we switch PDT = Off
"Off" = upto 5 orders per day are received as "PSP Pending"
"On" = approx 1 order per week

I have raised this up with Sellerdeck support, but haven't really got to the bottom of this.

Recently we switched from "Charge immediately" to "Pre-authorise":
#1 : To see if this problem still exists in this mode
#2 : Paypal "refund" button in v16 saves us time (no more logging into Paypal to find/refund etc...)
#3 : Work flow is in line with our Sellerdeck Payments setting, which is also "pre-authorise"

Sellerdeck Support advised me this:

Thanks for getting back.

>>> I was told by #### the software we have does not support PDT,
but switching it "ON" helped us.

PDT has only been supported in v16 of the software, previous versions did not support this using the older IPN method.
I can only assume my colleague has confused the version that is in use.

>>> When switched "ON", I was told the auto return should be empty,

You simply need to add the domain name, i.e. "http://domainname/" as the actual 'auto-return' is handled by the software, however the PayPal account requires that at least the domain name is entered here.

>>> Does Sellerdeck have a guide to setting up
"Paypal Website Payments" / "Paypal Express" now?

The original documentation was intended to be updated by the PSP concerned and should appear when the 'Information and Registration' button in the configuration dialog is pressed, this however has been changed by most PSP's to an advertisement or to the home page.
Currently the 'PayPal' button redirects to a knowledgebase entry as they chose to point it to their home page.

Here is how to activate PDT

You must activate PDT and Auto Return in your PayPal account profile.
You must also acquire a PDT identity token, which is used in all PDT communication you send to PayPal.

Follow these steps to configure your account for PDT:

Log in to your PayPal account.
Click the 'Profile' subtab.
Click 'Website Payment Preferences' in the 'Seller Preferences' column.
Under 'Auto Return' for Website Payments, click the On radio button.
For the 'Return URL', enter the URL on your site that will receive the transaction ID posted by PayPal after a customer payment.
Under 'Payment Data Transfer', click the 'On' radio button.
Click 'Save'.
Click 'Website Payment Preferences' in the 'Seller Preferences' column.
Scroll down to the 'Payment Data Transfer' section of the page to view your PDT identity token.

Once you have the identity token, go to 'Settings | Business Settings | Payment and Security' and click the 'Configure Method' button and enter the identity token code into the field 'Identity Token' and click 'OK' and then in the main 'Payment and Security' screen click 'Apply' and close the screen.

Once you have done this upload the site for the changes to take place.

[Air-Tech]

My understanding was that PDT directed (or forced) the purchaser back to our site more effectively than IPN & that this would result in an improvement in the number of successful auto order confirmations being sent out to customers.

Failed order confirmations for whatever reason are a poor show & I'm just trying to reduce the number, from this point of view PDT seems to work flawlessly (so far anyway), but has created an new issue with Pre-Authorised transactions....

[Mike Hughes]

I guess this is new PayPal feature that sellerdeck introduced in V14.

Shoppers can now be returned direct to your site after paying with PayPal, without having to click through from an intermediate page.

The pre-authorisation sounds like a bug to me but an odd one. According to Paypal this should only happen when the buyer is sent to Paypal with the variable paymentaction = authorization. So it sounds as if Sellerdeck must be setting this when they hand over to paypal.

I'd chase sellerdeck support to get a fix.

[Air-Tech]

Thanks.

It appears to be new in V14 - there is an identity token field in PSP configuration / PSP settings that's not in V13.

I'll speak to support.

[oginet]

Product details not passing to PayPal

I've set up customer on Sellerdeck V16, accepting c cards and PayPal. With orders with PayPal payment the PayPal notification has unrecognised info in the product details, though correct product description is shown in Sellerdeck Orders area. Is this anything to do with PDT? (Customer was previously usign Prestashop with PayPal payments only which did carry the correct product title in emails from PayPal of payments received)

[zgap111]

For us, we use both:
Paypal Express & Paypal Website Payments

The confirmations from Paypal for:

Paypal Express
= shows item description and ref number of the item

Paypal Website Payments
= only shows the order number - no description of goods at all.

Could the "unrecognised info" be the order number?
- The default order numbers for Sellerdeck is a mix (customer's initials + postcode + number)

[oginet]

PayPal Order info

Thanks for the reply on this, y

Could the "unrecognised info" be the order number? Yes - how did I not notice.