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osCommerce

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Bob Stein, VisiBone

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About Bob Stein, VisiBone

  • Birthday 05/02/1959

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  1. CANCEL RED ALERT – FOR USPS METHODS USERS? Regarding those alarmist emails from USPS "Action Required by September 30, 2006!" I am holding onto the hope that no change is needed, at least not for the USPS Methods contribution, which calculates USPS rates for customer shipping charges. Here's why I'm hopeful: None of the 46 API's in the USPS notice mention "rate". The Web Tools Technical Guide (see link in your notice) for Rate Calculators still talks about HTTP: The guide for other API services does mention HTTPS, e.g. Delivery Confirmation: and the DeliveryConfirmationV3 API is listed in the notice. Similarly, HTTPS is mentioned for Customs forms, Express Mail labels, etc., and those APIs are listed in the notice. My rate calculator still works. (Although I haven't gotten the FOURTH NOTICE as CarolGann did. So far I've only gotten 3 notices: 4/27/2006, 6/11/2006, 6/27/2006.) You have to register for USPS Web Tools to see those guides. But if you received the same alarmist notice I did (see CarolGann's post), you must have already signed up for USPS Web Tools, which is part of the process of installing the USPS Methods contribution. I have been groaning for months over having to modify http_client.php to support SSL for HTTPS requests. The PHP Cookbook says to use cURL for that, instead of fsockopen(), fputs() etc. as currently used by osCommerce. Seems there's no need. Changes may be needed for other USPS contributions.
  2. To follow up on the issue with PayPal rejecting credit cards or emails already associated with PayPal accounts, the moderator at paypaldev.org just locked the thread I had started for reporting customer problems. I thought I was in a discussion with someone who didn't want to believe it was happening to their customers, then I found out the hard way that was the moderator. Yikes. http://www.paypaldev.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6443 And I didn't even post the angriest feedback letter I got from a customer...
  3. Just found out from a customer in Brazil that PayPal doesn't support special characters like ? ? ? ? ? in the billing address, giving customers the error message "You have entered unsupported characters such as ?. Only German and US characters are currently supported. Please use alternatives like e, then try again" (screen shot: http://www.visibone.com/products/UnsupportedCharacters.gif ). Greg, you probably know this but thought I'd pass it along. I was thinking we could warn customers, or translate the characters ... but then there'd be no graceful way to turn that off, once PayPal started allowing special characters. Sigh. Clicking on the Continue link sends people right back to where they can edit the order, which makes me think you already addressed this as best one can. ;-)
  4. Eric, I'll take a stab at being useful here. The shortest answer is: no password needed. The reason is the IPN feedback URL is specified inside the transaction (along with order amount, payee, etc.). You don't need to set the IPN URL in your PayPal profile. Greg Baboolal's module conveys users to PayPal for the purpose of paying you. When this handover of your customer happens, Greg's software passes instructions for the IPN notification to close the loop. No password needed because no secrets are given away. Greg's software is essentially telling the PayPal servers "Here's a guy wanting to pay [email protected] $xx.xx. If the guy really does pay, please confirm by posting to URL blahblah/ipn.php". The URL is strategically designed by Greg to trigger order confirmation in osCommerce: going to the "Pending" status. The only information "leaked" by PayPal about your account is the single bit that your customer paid up. For the technical answer to your question, search Greg's code for "notify_url". That's the XML variable set in catalog/includes/modules/payment/paypal.php.
  5. Mysterious PayPal IPN delays today? Noticed PayPal IPN coming in 3 hours late. Checked PayPal transaction details and raw log files -- order was consummated 14:44 local, IPN came in 17:57 local. Greg I seem to recall you mentioning there could be a delay? Sure is disconcerting having gotten used to seeing it "Instantly". Several other orders are still awaiting IPN...
  6. Thanks for asking for the code to the [info] popup help in the credit card logo implementation, Steel. Old code in catalog/checkout_payment.php: <td class="main" colspan="3"><b><?php echo $selection[$i]['module']; ?></b></td> New code in catalog/checkout_payment.php: <td class="main" colspan="3" nowrap><?php if ($selection[$i]['module'] == 'PayPal') { ?> <big><b> Credit Card <img src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/logo_ccVisa.gif" border="0" title=" Visa " alt="Visa" align="bottom"> <img src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/logo_ccMC.gif" border="0" title=" MasterCard " alt="MasterCard" align="bottom"> <img src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/logo_ccDiscover.gif" border="0" title=" Discover " alt="Discover" align="bottom"> <img src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/logo_ccAmex.gif" border="0" title=" American Express " alt="American Express"align="bottom"> or <img src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/bnr/banner_intl.gif" border="0" title=" PayPal " alt="PayPal" align="bottom"> </b></big> <br> You do not need to be a PayPal member to pay by credit card. <script> document.writeln('<a style="cursor:hand" onclick="javascript:popup=window.open(' + '\'http://(your domain here)/catalog/CreditCardExplain.html\',\'popup\',' + '\'scrollbars,resizable,width=500,height=600,left=50,top=50\'); popup.focus(); return false;">' + '<font color="blue"><u>[info]</u></font></a>'); </script><noscript> <a href="CreditCardExplain.html" target="_blank"><font color="blue"><u>[info]</u></font></a> </noscript> <?php } else if ($selection[$i]['module'] == 'Check/Money Order') { ?><big><b>Check or Money Order </b></big> <img src="https://(your domain here)/(some folder)/check.gif" border=0 alt=" Send Us a Check " align="absmiddle"> <?php } else { echo '<big><b>' . $selection[$i]['module'] . '</b></big>'; } ?></td> This is the whole thing, including bigger bolder terminology, and an image for pay-by-check. Look for the <script> ... </script><noscript> ... </noscript> sections if all you want is the [info] popup. (Say isn't this spooky? It's JavaScript inside HTML inside JavaScript inside HTML inside PHP inside HTML.) (Sorry this looks messy, but the indentation is ready to drop in. It looks better if you have a very wide screen to stretch it out to the right. Personally I like code that never goes beyond column 79, but that's sure not the oscommerce way...)
  7. Steel, my customers have gone through a similar fog of confusion with PayPal versus Credit Cards. Here's my latest solution: The [info] popup message is: http://www.visibone.com/catalog/CreditCardExplain.html EVEN SO, I just talked with a customer today who thought the Payment Details screen was a PayPal login screen. My theory is people only read the titles of the entry fields, filling in whatever is thrown at them. I know I get that way. I am very close to giving up with PayPal as a general-purpose credit card payment processor (though not as a PayPal payment processor). The above tweaks have helped a good deal with the confusion problem, but there's another problem, even more insidious. This cruel PayPal error message: In other words, PayPal members cannot use their credit cards or email addresses to make a purchase in your store. It's downright sadistic, especially when it blows away a whole screen of order data entry (that page has a short timeout). I posted several customer flames about this on paypaldev.org.
  8. Greg I took your suggestion and posted my problems with PayPal in the PayPal Developer Network forums, paypaldev.org. After collecting several customer complaints myself, and seeing others in that forum, I started two threads there: Buyer Horror Stories: Payment Details page (confusion: credit card entry versus PayPal login) Buyer Horror Stories: Billing Information page (frustration: credit card or email addresses cannot already be associated with a PayPal account -- order entry lost) Please pardon my intrusion here, I know this is off-topic. But perhaps if others are having these problems we can get PayPal to be a better Merchant Service Provider.
  9. Greg, about step [6] of the order resume modification, don't I need to change paypal's "invoice" variable, as well as their "custom" variable to avoid duplicate payments from the resubmission? In other words, around line 200 of catalog/includes/modules/payment/paypal.php, shouldn't I change: to: Without this change, I could make a duplicate payment. With this change I get the desirable error from PayPal: "This invoice has already been paid..."
  10. Greg, thanks very much for those changes for a resume button on the Order Information screen. Works great. However, I am still getting 25% of orders in "Pending PayPal Notification" limbo. I phoned 2 customers and both said "I wanted to pay by credit card, not paypal". I'm starting to think it's the PayPal screen that's confusing. So here's my big question: When a customer confirms their order, it always jumps to PayPal's Payment Details screen. Is there a way to jump directly to the Billing Information screen, where they type their card number? Too many people don't see that little Click Here button. Then I could:
  11. Discovered a couple of things in the first 25 orders thought I'd pass along. About the situation where the order status is stuck in "Pending PayPal Notification" limbo, this has happened about three times so far. (In one case a guy had to update the credit card expiration in his PayPal account and in the process lost track of the payment he was trying to send me.) I have a tiny improvement to this annoying situation. If they log back on and check their order status they see: Usually the solution is then to send them a PayPal Money Request. This gets them to the same screen where they can pay as non-PayPal members, where PayPal shows them: I'm also emailing anyone who signs up but doesn't place an order. I've had about five of these so far and every one has been someone who wanted to buy but ran into trouble. Which leads to an even more important suggestion: show credit card icons! Many people said they wanted to pay by credit card but couldn't! So I changed the Payment Method choice to look like this: Anyone know of any rules broken by this? I could not find anywhere that PayPal disallows the use of their icons in this way (as CCNow did).
  12. Cancel that, the missing order id was my fault. The missing customer name problem seems to be fixed.
  13. Thanks for the GREAT module, Mr. B.! I just got on the air (www.visibone.com/catalog). Three real sales so far... About the problem with missing customer name in the order confirmation email, I just implemented your solution for v2.3 ( http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?sho...ndpost&p=373293 ) thanks for that. Before I made that change the problem was intermittent -- 3 order notification had first & last names 2 did not. I ALSO noticed that when it did not have the names it also had a missing order id in the link. I was working on the theory that what made the difference was whether there was a retry on the IPN transaction id, you know that test in catalog/ipn.php: if ($ipn->unique_txn_id()) { Just a wild guess. Will see soon if the problem recurs... -- Bob Stein, VisiBone
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