Processing eCommerce confirmations

Question

Hi

When dealing with an eCommerce transaction that has just completed, is there a standardized way to access the values in a confirmation page or does it depend greatly upon the implementation.

I'm trying to build a shopping cart add-on that will grab the transaction value and confirmation id from any given eCommerce store and send the value somewhere else for processing.

The idea will be that the eCommerce store owner can add this piece of code to their site to use our service.

Thanks for any pointers.

Answer 1

There is typically a wide variety when it comes to things of this nature and it all depends on what specific service and integration system you are working with.

Paypal for example sends IPN (Instant Payment Notifications) to a page that you specify, from there you read in all of the form values, re-submit a validation request to them to ensure they sent it, then you can work with the values in a manner that you like. THis is all done outside of a standard shopping cart as it can be called X time after the user paid.

Other systems such as Authorize.NET require that you collect the Credit Card information, and from your server submit web requests to validate, then process the data from there. This is a separate process, and doesn't rely much on confirmation values.

I think the key here is knowing what exactly you are trying to do.

Answer 2

Thanks Mitchel, this is pretty much what I thought. I was hoping there may be some magical solution but it sounds like you need to implement code for each specific scenario, be it paypal, google checkout etc.

what a pain!