Future store updates planned (backend)

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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

Yeah, we pretty much came to the same conclusion as well... In that while we could tape items to card to keep the more flat, but it just creates more work and expense, just to save like the buyer £1 in postage. Plus there is the risk factor of items are more likely to get damaged, particularly overseas, plus envelopes tend to get jammed in the sorting machines and disappear. Overall is just not worth the hassle.

Small items like the ROM's (PLCC chip) should be okay to send in a jiffy bag, and of course everyone in the world now gets these £2 cheaper than before now.

But of course people don't generally just order one thing.. If a larger item such as the ROM PCB (assembled) is also ordered, this is set to go in the box, it basically has no choice. So both items go in the same box, and boxes always take priority over the jiffy bags... Really it can be seen as jiffy bags or standard postage unless otherwise stated (IE BOX) .

Of course there is some slight issues in the system that if someone ordered 10 switches, they should really go in a box because of the overlapping issue during transit inside the jiffy bag.. So there would need to be another system in place that says if anyone orders more than 2 of the same item, it goes in a box.. But of course it still would not work out if someone ordered various ROM's on their own, as it would be one item of each. Of course anything over £10 defaults back to a box anyway.. But the problem really is where to draw the line and what we allow to be sent in a jiffy bag and what not.

But for the moment, I do not think anyone is going to order a massive amount of the same item which will go in a jiffy bag anyway.. Of course only really affects low-cost items such as the switches and maybe header pins etc anyway. So will just see how it goes this new system in place over the next few months.
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

I still haven't had time to implement SCA into my store. I don't know what will happen to transactions within the EU. But a forewarning that EU transactions may well fail when SCA comes into effect next month.

My store will have to go offline until its fixed if SCA causes issues. Though I just don't have time or the energy to start fighting with integration docs at the moment.

So anyone in the EU who is planning on a order should probably do so before 14th of September as I have no idea is EU transactions will fail or not after that date.

As a side note, we reduced the postage costs a lot on most items to be more accurate, only to find prices have increased meanwhile so now we are losing out on a lot of postage costs now :roll: so at some point we are simply going to weigh all the items and move postages cost over to calculated weights instead. This way we can have a small lookup table to current postage costs so I don't have to keep recalculating postage costs every few months.
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

I got this from stripe...
SCA is necessary for online EU payments as without it, it will cause payments to fail. This is being enforced from the issuers and banks end.
So my store will have to go offline next month until I can figure out how to make these changes :(

Stripes supports seems to be going downhill as time goes on as well. They pretty much got me working at day 1, but now its endless pages of technical docs which branch off to other endless branches of docs which all mean nothing to me anyway :roll:
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

Does anyone know of any reliable payment processors which I can easily integrate into php scripts ?

Problem with stripe it makes no sense, and huge frameworks involved, its just not needed. There must be a easier way to just bill a card with what my php scripts tell it to bill ? I mean it pretty much does that now, but everything is so tangled up its ridiculous.

For starters, Stripe went from JS to PHP, where my PHP scripts took care of the error pages etc.. but now it looks like Stripe have taken that control away to a page directed in JS which is basically "pass or fail" generic HTML page.. what use is that ? the PHP code reports the errors at the moment.

Considering Stripe were helpful originally, I feel like moving away form them now just on principle. I can't see how the changes are going to be easy, and they keep pushing some other new framework thing now, like I don't have time to keep re-writing my webstore to integrate new frameworks.
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

I have two other payment processes in mind and have emailed them both and hopefully will come by was something constructive.

Thinking about the hassle I had setting up Stripe the first place, and now when something changes I have to do code changes on my store which kind of defeats the object of having a external payment processor take care of the payment side of things. And sure, the payment processor should implement extra security steps or whatever, but this should not really affect how my store works, as the only thing I really need to do is pass name and address and the amount of bill over to the payment processor, I should not have to do any more additional work than that.

So considering stripe were really helpful a couple years ago, and reply to emails within 10 minutes, it was why I went with them, as their support was good. Now it is pretty much taking them two days to reply, where the extent of support is just dumping me to URL's basically make no sense, and even look like they have the security hole for hacking to me as well, but with my many questions, this is going to drag on for months at this rate. I think it is just time to move on.

Soldering as well strive has limited payment options, basically credit card, I of course I'm aware of people in the EU we do not have credit cards. I basically get complaints about this all the time and have done for the past two years or more. So moving to a more "beneficial" payment system would help people out in the EU where they could pay with debit cards as well.

One of the payment systems I am currently looking at is sagepay. A UK based company, been around for a while, but they seem to support just about every payment option including PayPal ( I honestly do not want to deal with PayPal so would probably turn that option off anyway). But with poor credit cards and debit cards been possible, they should help out a lot of people being able to purchase items from my store easier.

The only thing I'm slightly put off as they run a subscription-based service as opposed to a percent per transaction basis. It looks like the packages about £25 a month... Strike basically is for example 3% per transaction, so technically if I had 10 orders at £100 each, at 3% that would be £30 in fees anyway. of course in reality my do not get that many orders per month, and it would more likely be £20-£60 a order. overall I would probably lose out on £10 a month, but it is hard to calculate as orders are not consistent in my store as someone saw extremely busy and other months are pretty much dead. So of course paying £25 for no orders isn't going to end well for me.

Though if their support is good, and they offer a good service, at least that would be something. I think possibly the worst case would be I would basically have to add £1 extra onto the postage to cover the monthly subscription costs.Is possible it could be even be 50p.. But the bottom line is it can be doable..

I am looking at another payment system, which I actually already use, they charge a % per transaction, so I emailed them as well...
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by guus.assmann »

Hello Exxos,

Maybe iDeal is an option?
I would welcome this, as I don't have (or want) a credit-card.

BR/
Guus
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

guus.assmann wrote: Fri Aug 09, 2019 10:46 am I would welcome this, as I don't have (or want) a credit-card.
I would assume you could use a debit card though anyway ? as said above, a lot of people in EU do not have a credit card, so if I'm going to use a new payment processor, I think that option should be a must.
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

Reviews on stripe seem to be going very bad.. not like I trust half of what goes on with these sites.. but still....

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/stripe.com
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

Still no reply from Stripe. So I think we are "done".

I signed up with Sage as they seem to offer a wide range of payment solutions. I just need to see if they will accept my application. I read their 61 page integration guide today and I think I get the jist of it. They offer a "sandbox" so I can test stuff out without going fully live.

If signing up goes well and my account goes active hopefully next week sometime, Then I should be able to start doing some test runs with some code. Next week I'll start stripping out all the stripe code from my store ( not the live version, I will be working on a copy) and making preparations for the new payment processor code.

What I am likely going to be doing instead of having a fully integrated processor like stripe, on checkout it will redirect to the payment page on Sage. once the payment is completed it will direct back to my store which will actually process the order as it does do already. So there will be a bit of " page swapping" involved. But this way, if I need to change the payment processor in the future, I will only have to change how my server talks to the payment server site. Then in future if there is any other security changes or updates, they will not affect anything in my store, as all this stuff will be taking care of on the processor site directly.

Currently when the shipping address is entered onto my website, I have to pop up a small JS box to confirm the address is actually correct, as no end of people don't seem to know which country they live in! but with the new system, it will direct to a similar checkout page as it does now, where we will list the items which you are ordering, and it will also display your name and address on this page... The extra step is you need to click continue on that page to actually progress to the payment page, which will be hosted on Sage. Then once all the payment malarkey is finished, it will go back to my server to actually process the order.

When I initially coded my store, I anticipated having to move to a separate payment processor at the time.. There was basically the receipt part, payment part, and the processing part, the payment part was actually branched off to some separate stripe files anyway. So really all I'm doing is branching off to a different payment processor page. Of course integrating a new payment processor will have some subtle differences which I will need to adapt to, but it should be straightforward changes.

Overall, my store will not really function any different than it does now, just things will happen in slightly different order and there will be a separate payment page as opposed to a integrated one.. At least that's the theory and plan anyway :lol:

Incidentally, this is all going to keep me busy for a while, so I am not going to have time to work on any hardware development or out of stock items in my store until my new web store system is online.
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Re: Future store updates planned (backend)

Post by exxos »

<stripe rant>

I was looking again at the Stripe docs ( I was considering still using them until my new store goes online as it could take longer than a month) and found another "slight" issue.

They actually changed how "success and fail" pages work now. Currently my server gets back "pass or fail" actions and goes onto charge the card.. If the payment fails, it errors on the php page and job done. If the payment works, the script continues and sends out order receipts etc instantly.

The new stripe system can't do that anymore. They want to direct to a seperate pass or fail page, where they even say in their own docs not to rely on this mechanism as people could close the page. So I have no control over pass or failure of payments now, and this breaks the flow of my script in sending out order receipts etc.

Basically their "solution" is to "poll" the order database for new orders and run scripts based on that.. like WTF ? Thats a terrible idea! Currently everything happens in under a seconds, but on the new system, I would have to poll the database like every 2 seconds to get any sort of "respence" speed to processing orders.

When transactions complete, I also deduct those ordered items from the database, this happens instantly after payment. As people know, stuff goes out of stock a lot. So if one person ordered the last item in my store.. there would then be a delay of what ever the database polling speed is before that item is taken from stock. Now if I had 5minutes as the polling speed, a second person could then order the same item as at that point it would still be showing in stock.. so after those 2 orders were actually finished, my stock would be a negative number and then I would have to cancel one of those buyers orders as there would be no stock of that item.

I could poll every 10 seconds, but I also have a lot of logging turned on on my server, I keep a close eye on stats and activity (there is a lot of hacking going on all the time on my server) So I need logging to keep a eye on it all. I don't want to fill up my logs with endless SQL accesses either.

Granted this situation may not happen, but I don't want to roll out a system where I know there are "bugs" . If I was having 100 orders a day the polling would have to be every second. Any larger stores, thats what they going to have to do.. but seems like a lot of unnecessary DB accesses..

I think it was Stripe who power some microsoft and google payments, so they got profits from 2 of the words big players. I just think they are just not bothered about the "little guys" anymore. Same way as paypal and ebay went.

However you look at Stripe now, its just providing the service I need anymore. Either support wise or technology wise :roll: .

</stripe rant>
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