Customizing the Purchase Screen

When the user is ready to check out, they should go to a page to collect information about payment and shipping information.

Required Fields
Action Purchase
Payment_Method see below
Auth_Type Normal Authorization or Authorization Only
Shipping Options
Shipping_Method Overnight, etc.
Shipping_Charge Charge for shipping to the client
Notes Any other information
You can specify shipping method and shipping charge in the same selement, separated by an @ sign, like so...
<input type="radio" name="Shipping_Method" value="USPS Priority Mail@3.00" > + $3.00 Priority Mail<br />
<input type="radio" name="Shipping_Method" value="FedEx Overnight@10.00" > + $10.00 FedEx Overnight<br />
If you allow shipping to a different location..
Shipping_Name Name to ship to
Shipping_AddressAddress to ship to
Shipping_City City
Shipping_State State or Territory
Shipping_Zip Zip or Postal Code
Shipping_CountryCountry the address is in.

There are no custom fields for purchases. To store information specific to the purchase (but not to any of the items in the cart) store the information in a form element named Notes. You may submit multiple form elements with the name Notes, the results will be concatenated.

Online Payment Authentication

The following table presents the possible payment methods. You should only include those methods which the merchant supports.

Payment_Method Possible Values
Manual No authentication is done. The merchant must process the order and payment.
C.O.D. The COD Charge is added to the order. No authentication is done.
Visa Online authorization of the charge is immediately performed.
MasterCard
AMEX
Discover
Check Online submission is performed. Don't ship product until payment is confirmed.

If the product to be purchased is downloadable software or online services, then only credit cards should be accepted.

Payment Authorization Failure

If the online transaction fails, the user will be redirected back to the same page with a payment error. For this reason, the purchase screen should contain the error output in a way which doesn't appear when undefined.

An excellent example would be ..
<p>
<font color="red" size="+3"><!-- ERROR_MESSAGE --></font>
</p>
Look here for information about:

Testing Authorization

There are two ways to test. The first is to enable Auth Test Mode mode in the Transact e-commerce Admin Tool, under Configuration. This configuration option affects the entire store, and is therefore generally only used when first creating the site. If you need test authorizations after the fact, it is better to make a test page for yourself and submit the following form element:

<input type="hidden" name="Auth_Test_Mode" value="1">

In all cases the basic tests are performed on our side. Different authorization services have different levels of support for test transactions. Some will only return a SUCCESS, others will provide the answer you have requested. Some of them test all the way through their system, others only validate the basic input before returning a response. Unfortunately you can only test and read the Debug to see what kind of results you get.

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