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How can I solve the following problem: Let’s assume that a Customer has bought
a product from the ePay and his Credit Card has been normally charged (the
transaction is displayed through the ePayAdmin), but I cannot find the
Customer’s personal data in order to send him the products.
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How can my site realize successfully a Shopping Cart?
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What is ePayAdmin and how can it be useful?
1. YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE CAREFULLY PLANNED.
Your Application must provide some “extreme cases” such as the one described
above. Usually, most applications record data only after MARFIN EGNATIA BANK
has managed to “return” to one of the following. EXITURL, CANCELURL,
RETURN_URL. But this is not enough. The solution to the problem is that the
application must record in detail the Customer’s data in a Database before the
transition to MARFIN EGNATIA BANK and after the successful or not charge the
system must confirm that specific transaction as completed or not, since the
transition from MARFIN EGNATIA BANK to you has been completed without any
problem to one of the three scripts. But if this transition is not realized
(you server is down or the network was out of order at that moment) then, if
you have not saved the Customer’s data somewhere, you do not have any way to
retrieve them, even though MARFIN EGNATIA BANK has recorded normally that
specific charge. Moreover, in this way, you can also clean your Database from
“rubbish” that is the transactions that have not led to a charge of credit
cards. Do not forget that your EXITURL, CANCELURL and RETURN_URL scripts must
react only to calls from MARFIN EGNATIABANK. Moreover, in order to be
analytically informed regarding your transactions, you can have direct access
to them through en easy-to-use tool, the ePayAdmin.
2. EMPTY THE SHOPPING CART PROPERLY.
The shopping cart is a mechanism that allows the Customers to choose the
products they like and to decide latter if they want to buy them. There are
generally two methods in order to keep a shopping cart:
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Server Side
(session object at ASP/Microsoft, client object at SSJS/Netscape) and
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Client Side (HTTP-Cookie, URL).
Both ways have their pros and cons. The Server methods are an additional burden
to the Server and have a specific life cycle (the ASP default of the session
object is 20 minutes) but they are fast and easy to use, while the Client Side
methods do not burden at all the server but, especially in the case of cookie,
they tend to be proved useless, since the Customer may decide in its browser
that he does not accept cookies.
The important part in the Customers’ applications is to take care of the life
time of that shopping cart. It has been observed that sometimes the choices
made by a Customer have been kept even after he has made his final decision to
purchase the products!
Moreover pay attention to the “life” cycle of the session objects: if they do
not disappear as expected, you must force them to disappear using a code such
as Session Abandon at ASP or to set the cookie so that the “expires field” is a
date in the past (it deletes the cookies).
3) A TOOL FOR YOUR INFORMATION
that has direct access to all transactions related directly to its shopping
site.
The access is made by using the User-Id/Password, which you can receive from
MARFIN EGNATIA BANK for free if you have been subscribed to the ePay
service. The Interface gives you the possibility to select a time period and
the type of transactions (All, Valid, Invalid). After that, it presents you an
analytical list of all transactions (of the type selected) with the following
data: Date, Time, Amount, Status and Authorization Code by VISA.
With the ePay Admin you can compare the data collected by your application with
the ones actually recorded by MARFIN EGNATIA BANK. In this way, before you send
products or allow the access to services, you can check through the ePayAdmin
if the Credit Card has been charged normally (the transaction will have an OK
Status and some Authorization Code by VISA of MasterCard).
The TRANSACTION_ID is not recorded in the list since it plays some role only in
the Partners’ sites. But there is the AUTHORIZATION_ID that has been given on
line by VISA or MASTERCARD and it is the most reliable certificate for a
purchase. In this way, you can compare the AUTHORIZATION_ID of your application
with the ones actually authorized by VISA or MASTERCARD. Moreover, MARFIN
EGNATIA BANK, through the ePay provides you with a dynamic mechanism so that
you are able to decide yourself which data are necessary for your accounting
settlement.
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