Custom Payment Options: Store Cards, Purchase Order, etc.

About this feature

ProductCart also features support for custom payment methods that require you to collect multiple pieces of information from the customer. This feature is useful to stores that offer credit card-like payment options, such as debit cards, store cards, and similar payment systems. In this document we will refer to these payment methods as Custom Cards.

For example, your store may offer a store card for which you need to collect the following information:

• Account Number
• Issued On
• Valid Until
• Cardholder Name

Or you could let customers pay by “Purchase Order” and require that they enter they following information:

• Purchase Order Number
• Accounting Dept. Contact Name
• Accounting Dept. Phone Number

ProductCart does NOT perform any validation on any of the information submitted by the customer, other than checking to see whether a required field was filled out or not.

However, this feature can help you elegantly collect payment information that would be otherwise hard to obtain from the customer during the checkout process. It is then up to you to check the validity of the submitted payment details before processing the order.
 

General Payment Settings

To add a custom card to your store, select Add New Payment Option from the Payments menu, and then click on Debit cards, store cards, etc.

• Option Name. Enter the name for this custom card.
• Check whether this payment option should apply to wholesale customers only
• Processing Fee. Choose whether to charge an additional transaction fee using the Processing Fee field. The fee can be either a flat charge or a percentage of the total order amount.
• Payment fields. Add the first input field that will be displayed on the payment details page (e.g. Account Number). You will be able to add additional fields once you click on the Continue button. For each input field, you can specify the following:
  • A description for the field under Text Label (maximum 50 characters).
  • Whether or not they field is required.
  • The length of the field.
  • The maximum amount of characters that the field will accept. For example, if you are creating the field “Account Number” and you know all account numbers for this custom card are made of 12 digits, you could enter “12” here.

Click on the Continue button to save the information to the store database, and add new input fields, if necessary.
 

Unlimited Payment Fields

You can add unlimited input fields to a custom card. For each input field you can configure the properties mentioned above, and edit or delete a field at any time by clicking on the Edit or the Delete links respectively. Make sure not to delete custom card fields that have been used in previous orders, as this will affect the payment details for those orders.

Remember that ProductCart does not perform any validation on the format of the information submitted through the field, other than verifying that a required field has been filled out, and that the maximum number of characters for the field has not been exceeded.

A knowledgeable programmer could help you take a Custom Payment Option and integrate it with other systems that can allow you to perform real-time validation against one or more fields. For instance, you could check in real-time whether a certain payment account number (e.g. “Club Card”) is valid by interfacing ProductCart with the system where those accounts are stored.

Once you are done adding input fields to this custom card, you can set the order in which they will be displayed on the payment details page. To do so, enter a number in the order field, and then click on the Update Order button.