I'm moving my site's payment processing from Google Checkout to Google Wallet (Digital Goods API), but I'm running into an issue involving payment notification. My goal is to only send licenses to customers after orders are charged, but I don't see how this is possible.
Right now I'm sending licenses to users when I receive the postback JWT, but this isn't the behavior that I want, because, according to my tests so far, it takes about 30-60 minutes to actually charge the customer after the purchase (until then, the order is in a CHARGEABLE state). This is a problem because I've frequently had orders be cancelled before they are charged - I obviously don't want to send out licenses when this happens.
So my questions are:
1) Why aren't customers charged immediately? According to the documentation, "Google Wallet for digital goods orders are charged automatically", but there's no explanation of the delay.
2) Is there any way to receive a notification after the customer is charged? The postback and the success callback that are described in the documentation are both no good for this, because they're both triggered when the order enters the CHARGEABLE, rather than CHARGED state.
I'm hoping that there is some system like the Google Checkout Notification XML API, where different notifications are sent out at each stage of the purchase process, but the Google Wallet documentation makes no mention of such a system.
3) On a related note, is there any way for me to get email notifications when orders are complete? Google Checkout did this, but Google Wallet does not seem to offer this option.
3.) I suggest you send yourself an email through the success_handler via javascript. I'd probably use and ajax call like jQuery's .post and pass all the values such as order ID and so on to a php file and send the email from there.
https://developers.google.com/commerce/wallet/digital/docs/jsreference#successhandler
1+2) Here's how I understand it: CHARGEABLE means the credit card has been authorized, and whatever needs to happen between the banks and all that is in progress. CHARGED means google has actually received money from the banks. So the explanation of the delay (I believe) would be the same as if you buy something at the store with your debit card, then look at the account statement and the charge still is in there as "pending". I am under the assumption that you can pretty much rely on the CHARGEABLE state and consider it paid. Whatever happens after that is probably the same risk as when someone used a fraudulent credit card, and the charge gets returned later, or the customer disputes the charge on their statement.
How did your customers cancel the charges? If that happens, could you revoke the license?
Related
Before migrating to the Payment Intents API the user's credit card payment was confirmed and charged on the server side using the token (received from stripe.createToken) after the purchase has been completed. This gave us the possibility not to confirm the payment in case any errors happens.
Now, with the Payment Intents API the payment confirmation happens already on the client side (stripe.confirmCardPayment) which is a problem in case an error happens on the server side while completing the purchase as the credit card has already been charged. A refund is not valid solution your Stripe fees won't be refunded.
How can we implement card payments with the Payment Intents API but confirm the payment at the final end of the purchase (as in the legacy workflow)? Or how can we prevent the credit card from being charged in case an error occurs during the checkout workflow?
Unfortunately, we couldn't find a solution to this problem in the documentation.
Help appreciated!
Here are the docs: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-intents/migration
What you are looking for is modeled via "manual confirmation" of a PaymentIntent: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/accept-a-payment-synchronously.
It isn't Stripe's recommended integration. The recommended approach is to confirm client-side and listen to webhooks for payment confirmation.
This is because with manual confirmation, there is a higher chance of customer "drop off" where they authenticate your PaymentIntent on your webpage but close it out, meaning you lose your client->server roundtrip, leaving your payment unconfirmed (eventhough the customer thinks they authenticated hence paid).
Additionally, manual confirmation only works for card type payments, it is not supported for other payment methods based in other regions like iDEAL or SEPA Debit etc.
In our case, we wanted to authenticate the card payment at the end directly after making the charge. The Stripe support was able to help us with the following answer:
As I understand you would like to authenticate the payment at the end directly after making the charge. There is a solution to this, with the capture_method being set to Manual - https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_intents/create#create_payment_intent-capture_method. What this would mean is, that the charge will be made and the user / client would be able to confirm the payment afterwards in the Dashboard directly.
This method is called Auth and Capture. Place a hold on a card to reserve funds now but only capture them after your business completes the service. When a payment is authorized, the bank guarantees the amount and holds it on the customer’s card for up to seven days, or two days for in-person payments using Terminal. You can find more information along with the API's under this Link: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/capture-later#authorize-only
I am growing frustrated with the lack of features and poor documentation of the Google Wallet for digital goods subscription API.
My question is the following:
If Google wallet sends a postback to my URL, and I do not acknowledge the payment (send status 200), does the payment get refunded or not appear on the card statement in the first place?
It seems rather strange that there is no way to programmatically cancel subscriptions. A work around would be to manage subscriptions on my end and only accept the postback payment if their subscription is valid. This would of course be frustrating to a user if they canceled a subscription, yet they still see a charge to their card and then a refund. I would like to avoid that.
Thanks in advance again everyone.
I'm not a Googler so this is subject to being crucified :)
To get an official response, it would be best to contact Google directly - you should see a "HELP -> Contact Us" in your Wallet Merchant Center.
Important: If you specify a postback URL, your server must respond promptly and correctly to the HTTP POST messages that Google sends for each transaction. Otherwise, the transaction will be canceled.
REF: Official documentation on handling postbacks
This somehow/probably relates to the old question in credit card processing of the difference between an AUTHorization and an CHARGE (aka "capture").
An AUTH for x amount would need to be sent for processing. Otherwise, how would Google send you a positive result for the transaction (aka Google would send you a postback after such successful "Auth" transaction for x amount - re: does account have enough funds to cover x)?
So there would be a "pending AUTH" for x value on card holders' account, subject to "capture" (finalizing, turning that AUTH into a CHARGE) at some later time (perhaps after you successfully acknowledge the postback).
What Google does (e.g. "Void" or "never capture") to that pending AUTH if you don't acknowledge (aka "...transaction will be cancelled"), or whether or not the above scenario is actually what occurs in Wallet for Digital Goods, can only be answered by Google. The above is only a personal (mine and mine alone) insight to standard credit card processing...
Hth....
How can I tell from the stripe api -
A user has cancelled their subscription?
A user's credit card is no longer valid.
Is there anyway round having to call the stripe API every time the user logs in to check these facts?
Handling cancellations is purely the responsibility of your application—users don't have an interface to Stripe. If they're canceling, they're doing it through whatever account management system you provide. You should thus be tracking cancellations in your own database. Whatever database you're using, add a subscription status field and update it when a user cancels or re-subscribes.
As for tracking invalid cards, Stripe provides notifications of billing failures—and many other useful events—via webhooks. In most cases, if you're not implementing a webhook responder, you're working much too hard on your billing infrastructure. Stripe is built to push a wide variety of information to you; polling the API yourself is just overcomplicating things for most purposes.
I am new to integrate Google Wallet and there are some confusion and questions related to that given below:
Is it possible to add multiple items for Google wallet?
How to handle discount by API?
What's the parameter in JWT response on postback URL for success and failure transaction?
Is refund functionality available for a transaction by API call?
Anyone have idea about this. Thanks in advance.
Can you clarify which specific API (Instant Buy or Wallet for Digital)?
Is it possible to add multiple items...
Digital - no, you can however "bundle", see this post for clarification.
Instant Buy - it's just a "layer" on top of your (pre) existing purchase/ordering processes and handles (just) the payment data of a Google Wallet user. The "order details" is something you control. See sample of data you send.
Discounts by API
By API - no. You can pass whatever (pre-calculated) value in both APIs.
Success vs. Failure Postback
Digital - Google will only send HTTP Post to your server URL on successful transaction. See #5: "Google sends an HTTP POST message to the postback URL whenever a purchase completes..."
Instant Buy - not relevant. You are processing the transaction, unlike in Digital where Google is. Instant Buy in a nutshell provides your web site, secure access to a Google Wallet user's data. You need to have your own merchant account/processor, be PCI compliant, etc. That said, you will have the success or failure info that you actually have to send to Google - they need to know if you have successfully processed or not (yup, it's the other way around).
Refund by API
By API - Unless a Googler says otherwise, AFAIK, not at this time, for both APIs.
On that note, for Instant Buy, it's actually unclear to me how to "inform Google" when performing a credit or refund. Its still a "private API" (not GA) so I actually haven't seen its "guts". It's understood that since the merchant uses their own processor that a credit/refund is the same procedure, but letting Google "know" about it (days/weeks after the fact) is something I personally have no actual info on..sorry...I can assume some "button" in merchant center for Instant Buy, but that's just a guess....
Hth....
W.r.t InstantBuy Refunds:
The Refund happens on the virtual one time card that is returned by the Google API. The refund on the card can be done by using any backend payment processor. Once the refund is made to the card, it hits the user's backing card.
I’m integrating authorize.net into my web application. I’ve used the direct post method (DPM)to charge the account initially. However, for each transaction I also need to set up automated reoccurring billing. How would I go about doing this without asking for the information again, particularly when after DPM posts the initial transaction, the credit card data is no longer available?
I also would like to get the status of each reoccurring transaction so it can be confirmed and followed up on if necessary.
You can't do that with DPM as it takes the user's credit card information off of your website so you don't have access to it. If you want to make an initial payment and then use ARB to create a subscription you need to use AIM with ARB.
You need to use the ARB interface in order to do recurring transactions but there are a lot of problems with it, like lack of support (send an email and wait a couple of weeks for a non-helpful response for example) and weak documentation.
Documentation for SOAP interface for Authorize.net ARB:
http://www.authorize.net/support/ARB_SOAP_guide.pdf
And for the XMl interface:
http://www.authorize.net/support/ARB_guide.pdf
ARB programming documentation:
http://developer.authorize.net/api/arb/
I just switched off of Authorize.net to USAEPAY. Here are some reasons why:
1. When you use Authorize.net ARB, your customer comes on the site to sign up, and you send the ARB request to create the subscription and you get back a success code so you give the user the subscription. Then later that night they actually try to collect the first payment and a lot of times this fails, so you get a spreadsheet emailed to you the next day about the problem. This is terrible because now you lost the opportunity to say to the customer at sign up time that the card is declined. Goodbye sale!
2. I don't know if they added this recently but they didn't have a way to verify if a customer's credit card is still valid. Imagine 3 months into a subscription the card is over the limit, or cancelled, or expired etc. You don't know so how do you prompt the customer to put in a new card? You just stop getting paid, unless you want to manually open these spreadsheets and start emailing customers. YUCK.
USAEPAY works much better, the API is easier, its much better documented and you get email responses in 1-2 days and its less expensive. For example, you can query USAEPAY to get a list of successful payments, and verify that you shouldn't deactivate the account for non-payment:
http://wiki.usaepay.com/developer/soap-1.4/methods/getcustomerreport
Before you go too far with AuthNet I highly encourage you to save yourself a lot of pain and contact FranchisePaymentNetwork (FPN) to get set up with USAEpay.
They can even POST BACK to your website to let you know if a transaction is successful or not for recurring billing transactions and you can query it to verify that customer payments are getting collected so you know if you should expire an account or not.
I am not affiliated with USAEpay or Franchise Payment Network except as a satisfied paying customer / consumer of their services.