using ecart checkout without a payment gateway

Hi

In the eCart FAQ it mentions that eCart can be used without a payment gateway for offline payment processing. How can this be done? Is there any documentation on this?

Thanks

Don't know how they intended to do that safely.

See section 7 of this article:

E-commerce - Getting Started Guide
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Like it is noted in the link it is not good practice to email cc numbers and they should not be stored in your db without security in place. The eCart itself does not enforce any of these common sense rules for storing the order information, you can have the checkout work in whatever fashion you would like.

How do you currently process transactions offline? If you need to get access to the credit card number you could potentially store all of the order details including some contact info and just have someone follow up with the customer to get the cc number when the transaction is processed.

In response to the question why would you want to not use a payment gateway:

I have a client who wants only registered customers with accounts set up with them in the offline world to be able to order from their website. They want their customers, once registered with their website, to be able to place an order and then pay 'on invoice' as they already do. therefore just the website to store the order along with the registered shoppers id and then inform the merchant that an order has been placed. Personally I'm looking at this now and think it's probably a case of replacing the checkout buttons with 'place order' buttons and then writing a quick script to email the merchant who can then access the order details from their CMS. Would be much quicker and easier if there was a 'Payment on Account' or 'Invoice with Order' option as some other shopping cart systems do though.

With eCart you can create a setup just like you have described by choosing the 'no gateway' option when running the checkout wizard. It will create a standard checkout for you including the checkout page, and the confirm page. The checkout page will gather the user info. The confirm page would work the same. It will run the shipping quote if needed, store the order info in your db, then send out an email to the customer. Is there a part of this you are trying to accomplish but cannot with eCart? If so please explain about how you have your current setup and the end result you are trying to achieve versus what you have now.

I have a similar issue, I need the ability for "some" customers to be able to add orders to their account rather than pay for them using the payment gateway, the problem I have is that only certain customers have accounts so I would need both processes. How would I do this?

you would need to create 2 sets of checkout pages, when creating the second set of checkout pages, choose the no gateway option, and make sure to give them unique names.

using security assist, you can add access restriction to the no gateway checkout pages so that only logged in users can access them.