UK payment processors

[JulieR]

Of the non-Paypal payment processor modules available, which ones do you think are best for use with UK organisations with mostly UK-based transactions?  What do you use?

We are unable to use Paypal. [The story might amuse you.  The webform for opening a paypal charity/business account has some uncooperative validation checks - it rejects our organisation's founding date (1882) as invalid, as well as our 5-digit company number and 6-digit charity number, which it believes should be longer.  After extreme run-around with Paypal it became clear that no-one can make an account manually or otherwise bypass the dictatorial web form.  Web developers rule, ok!]

Anyway, I am now in the market for a more helpful payment processor, preferably with human beings operating their systems, and ideally with an existing integration module (or project I can contribute towards).  We have very low transaction volumes and sizes.  Any suggestions?

[Vnaz]

Not integrated into Civi, and does attract VAT  , but justgiving provide good service. If you have low transaction numbers, and don't want / need to implement civievent / civimember for your supporters, it might prove the simplest solution.

[JulieR]

Thanks Vnaz, but I do want to implement CiviMember and CiviEvent, so I defnitely need something either currently integrated or that I can sponsor for development.

P.S.  Has anyone looked at Worldpay or Streamline?

[Michael McAndrew]

Contributing to Worldpay integration would make you very popular   I have a feeling

I have been looking for Worldpay Ubercart integration recently and someone recommended I approach Worldpay for sponsorship.  Not a bad idea, though we had a little trouble trying to actually follow up on this request (with call centres etc.)

Do you have a budget?  If so it might be worth talking to people that have done Worldpay Ubercart integration modules - I can put you in touch with them if you like.

[Donald Lobo]

how about google checkout? u do need a valid https certificate for this one

lobo

[JulieR]

Michael! That's a stellar idea!  Only I'd approach Streamline for sponsorship, Worldpay is part of the group.  Maybe we could get one that works with all their processors.  My organisation already uses Streamline for our ordinary CC processing, so I'll see whether that gives me a route in.  Let me follow up on that.

Estimating how much time is takes will need:
- how hard is the worldpay integration: i'd be happy to chat to the ubercart guys if you can connect us
- how hard is it to bundle everything into a module?  Could we use one of the other ones as a shell?
If anyone could help make an estimate it would help a lot in my conversations either with Streamline or my own organisation.  

Last time I looked https certificates were pretty expensive, so I'd rather explore the other options first.

P.S.  I see Streamline is actually the CC bit and Worldpay is the online arm.  Worldpay has a partner programme, I will approach through there.

[Michael McAndrew]

My ballpark estimate is between £1,000 and £2,000.  Anyone have any more informed ideas?

[jpb]

The webform for opening a paypal charity/business account has some uncooperative validation checks - it rejects our organisation's founding date (1882) as invalid, as well as our 5-digit company number and 6-digit charity number, which it believes should be longer. 

Did you try padding the numbers with zeros at the start?  00012345

[JulieR]

Did you try padding the numbers with zeros at the start?

Yes I did, at the start as well as the end, and a few other digits as well.  It kept saying 'invalid number'.  Of course I was faking the date as well, since it wouldn't take 1882, so I don't know whether there is a background service call to the charities commission website to validate that the number and date match.  Paypal support couldn't tell me that either.

[Eileen]

Hi Michael,

I think your ballpark is on the high side - although I'd be very happy to do it for that range :-)

If recurring transactions is part of the brief it might wind up in the lower half of the range.

Where I have payment processors before I have looked at how good the documentation / api appears to be along with the features required to come up with a figure. So defining features is an important step in getting a price (mostly in CiviCRM's case this is a question of recurring or not recurring. I've seen someone wanting avs2 in Authorize.net but I don't know what this would mean in practice)

Eileen

[JulieR]

Hi Eileen, thanks for the input.  We would not need recurring payments; in fact I think most people in the UK who are prepared to make recurring payments would set up a direct debit instead (now there would be a nice future feature to support!).  Worldpay is a well established service so I suspect they would have everything you'd need in their documentation, which is at http://www.rbsworldpay.com/support/bg/index.php?page=development&c=UK.  Does that help narrow down the ballpark?

[Eileen]

Hmm,

I took a look and I have a bit of a problem with WorldPay (and indeed with a couple of others that have come up recently) and I'm not quite sure how I would tackle it.

The problem is that they require the User's browser to be sent off to the payment processor using a POST to the payment processor's URL. The existing hosted pages all use a GET (generally encrypted) which can easily be re-directed using PHP. They have another path for the return url

I may be missing something but I can't think of a way to slot the 'redirect on POST' into the existing CiviCRM code. I perhaps could with a hook but it doesn't seem appropriate. I did read that you can re-direct to an 'invisible form' with javascript doing the redirect automatically but I haven't quite figured out how you would generate a path that would be valid for Joomla/Drupal/Standalone for this purpose.

I suppose you could stick a php file that did that into the extern folder or something & just redirect to it with a GET but then I don't think you'd get CiviCRM look and feel around the page. Does anyone wiser than I have some ideas? If not it might be a bigger job than I first thought.

Eileen

[JulieR]

Eileen, if the consequence of this problem is just that you wouldn't "get CiviCRM look and feel around the page", my organisation could live with that.  If fact, as an end user, I have more confidence in a proper payment site, rather than something that looks like a once-off handmade job.  As long as my org name and the transaction details display on the page, I don't really care if it looks like a Worldpay page.  Of course I can understand that for a general-use module you'd prefer to make it as flexible as possible, but maybe it could be done in phases? Cheers, Julie

[JulieR]

I thought I should post a follow-up here.  I did actually make contact with the Senior Partner Manager at Worldpay UK.  He was friendly and positive, but keen to try to involve one of Worldpay's System Integrators... the business model wasn't clear to me, though I'm sure we could have figured something out.  We planned a follow-up call that got postponed and in the end didn't happen - my fault really, I stopped pushing because in the meantime I found a solution to my immediate problem with Paypal.  However, if anyone else is in a hurry to pick up this baton, do let me know.  I also made contact with the person responsible for global partner relations, who is based in the US.  When my site is launched and I have a little spare time I will try to pick this up again.

[Eileen]

Hello Julie, was there a specific issue you asked Worldpay about? ie. the GET vs POST thing or general integration.

Someone else recently wrote a processor where this was part of the spec but it turned out that using a GET was also supported by the processor.

Generally the System Integrators will know the Payment Processor code but not the CiviCRM code & the payment processor code isn't the tricky part of integrating it.