Payment Processors

LiveCart supports all popular online payment types and provides interface for plugging in additional payment processors.

Payment Processor Types

LiveCart supports 3 different types of payment processors. Each type uses a different approach and methods to process the payment, so the implementation has to be different as well.

Credit card payment processors

The workflow of processing a payment with a credit card processor is as follows:

1. Customer enters her credit card details in LiveCart credit card payment form
2. The form data is submitted to payment processor, which tells whether the authorization was successful or not
3. In the event of successful authorization, the order is finalized and the customer is redirected to the "Thank you" page

In this case the customer is never leaves your site and, of course, will not even know which processor you're using. LiveCart collects the card details, passes them to the payment processor from the server-side process and attempts to authorize the transaction.

External (3rd party) processors

There are many payment processors that either work as virtual wallets (PayPal, Moneybookers, etc) or process credit card payments using their own payment forms. The upside of such solutions is that you never need to worry about security as credit card details are never being entered at your site directly, however customer experience may suffer, since most customers do not expect being redirected to a 3rd party site for making the payment.

Express payment processors

Express payment/checkout is a rather new concept, which is quite different from the already mentioned payment types. The biggest difference is that it not only processes a payment but also provides customer shipping information, which makes it possible to make your checkout process much easier and faster even if the customer is placing her first order on your site. For example, the whole checkout process using Paypal Express Checkout would look as follows:

1. Customer selects the Paypal Express Checkout option at the shopping cart page and is immediately redirected to Paypal to authorize payment
2. PayPal already knows customer's shipping address and credit card details, so the customer doesn't need to re-enter these details again, so she can confirm her order with a single click of a mouse
3. PayPal sends customer's shipping address information back to LiveCart, which is used to calculate shipping costs. Customer is then presented with an order confirmation page that contains order total, including shipping. Again, it takes a single click of a mouse for the customer to confirm the order and release the payment.

Creating a new plugin

So, when creating a new plugin, the first thing to determine is the payment processor type.

Installation

To install the plugin, simply copy it's file to the appropriate directory:

• /library/payment/method/cc - for credit card handlers
• /library/payment/method/express - express payment handlers
• /library/payment/method/span> - external payment handlers

The file name must be identical to the class name. For example, if your class is named WorldPay, the file name must be WorldPay.php.