google checkout for ecart

Someone had to be first!

I have seen a number of posts requesting implementing google checkout for ecart, going back at least 12 months.

It is something I would like to do myself, but when I first thought about it, I was pretty new to ecart, so didn't feel ready.

Is this the time to put our collective minds together and come up with a solution, then a user guide ?

Yes I think that's a good idea Graig although you'd have to leave me out of the actual putting heads together bit. I wouldn't know where to start. But as a customer, I'd certainly be greatful of a "user guide" to adding Google Checkout to an eCart site. Especially if it also incorporated us UK'ers

Google checkout uses a three step process much like express checkout or proTX. It is pretty complex.

My opinion is that you could probably make an implementation for yourself pretty easily if you are good with Google Checkout... knowledge of our cart probably won't help much since that was never the hard part at least from our perspective.

Even a user guide may be difficult without configuration settings through a UI since there will be a lot to configure. We did a recent survey of the customer base around that issue. About 35% of our users were interested in the feature, but that is actually pretty low compared to other features listed. After all people could claim they wanted everything since cost was never a factor in the survey, so those numbers are always skewed toward "I want everything". We calculated it to be one of the more expensive from an engineering perspective because of the complicated process and how many interfaces it would effect to implement properly.

I'm not sure how you are proposing adding it. It could be added to powerstore probably relatively easily. Adding it to the extensions is a lot of work and a configuration guide in my opinion would be hard for a webassist user to follow and they would be put off if WebAssist promoted it with complex configuration instructions rather than a full UI.

We calculated that it would cost us somewhere around $20K to do the feature right and just didn't think it would move the needle that much based on the survey considering limited resources and opportunity cost of not working on other projects and features it just doesn't make sense for us yet.

We are actually in discussion with several payment gateways that aren't currently implemented and encouraging them to fund our development in order to get it into the tool. This approach has worked for us in the past and allows us to add features without having to depend on our users to pay for them, which is kind of what the economics around this feature necessitate at the moment.

Originally Said By: Ray Borduin

  We are actually in discussion with several payment gateways that aren't currently implemented and encouraging them to fund our development in order to get it into the tool. This approach has worked for us in the past and allows us to add features without having to depend on our users to pay for them, which is kind of what the economics around this feature necessitate at the moment.  

Ray,

Regarding the discussions with payment gateways, are there likely any approaches being made to UK based providers?

I also note what you have said about Google checkout being added to Powerstore. I think this could be a positive step also.

David

Which would you suggest? Unless there are a large number of customers requesting a specific gateway or that gateway approaches us, we won't target someone purely by geographic location. We have several that support UK transactions already.

Originally Said By: Ray Borduin

  Which would you suggest? Unless there are a large number of customers requesting a specific gateway or that gateway approaches us, we won't target someone purely by geographic location. We have several that support UK transactions already.  

I have dealt with the following company for many years and would say they are quite popular in England. I shall be speaking with them possibly tomorrow so I will ask what their take might be on implementing a gateway with Powerstore.

www.secure-server-hosting.com/

It isn't a common request, but if they were willing to fund it, we could potentially add it to powerstore or even eCart. We just need to justify the expense somehow either with sales or direct funding by the payment gateway.

An implementation in powerstore wouldn't be too expensive probably. A full fledged eCart implementation with the checkout wizard and server behaviors would be considerably more effort.

Ray,

I spoke with SecureHosting last week (Jonathan Rodger) and who today has sent me this email.

Quote
Hi David,
We would be delighted to have this as a cart that supports the SH payment gateway. The shopping cart code would first have to be edited to include our gateway. If this is just a one-off and the cart is written in PHP then we could do this for you (for no charge). It might be a better idea though to get Webassist to put in a generic SH gateway module so that all future users have access to it. Do you know if this is something Webassist are happy to do? If so we can just send them the integration instructions.

I look forward to hearing from you.
EndQuote

Perhaps you can initiate some dialogue with the company which may benefit everyone!

I look forward to your thoughts.

The issue isn't our ability to write the code. If you give contact information I can forward it to our president and we can see if they are interested in paying us to do it. Other than that it would take demand from our customers to initate this gateway implementation over Google or Amazon, which could also be added and have much higher user communities.