Payment Response

As far as you are concerned there are two possible outcomes for a payment - either it succeeds and the payment is made or else the shopper cancels the payment. The shopper can do the latter at any point, including when the bank declines a card transaction. The "card declined" status is never returned to you. The shopper always has the choice of trying another method of payment such as another card or else using a WorldAccount, if you are set up to take WorldAccount payments.

Returning the response to Yourself

Once a payment has been processed, either through to success or to cancellation, information about the processed transaction is made available to you through any of the following methods.

Statements and reports are always available to you and are documented in the WAS documentation. The other two are described further below.

Merchant Server Call-back

A request is made to a call-back URL that you provide, passing the parameters specified in the section Web-Merchant/WM Parameters, Payment Response. The contact details that are passed back are those that were used for processing the payment. Note that the shopper may have changed any details that you sent over with the original payment transaction. The script or servlet listening on this URL can do whatever it pleases with the parameters passed to it. For example, you might log the transaction to your own database. You can choose whether the page returned to Web-Merchant/WM in response to this request is used as the basis of the response sent to the shopper.

For Select Junior the call-back can be handled by an ordinary cgi script or any other kind of server-side form processing. For Select Pro the call-back must be handled by a SelectServlet, and for Select COM you should use an ASP script in conjuction with the COMcallback object. See the appropriate documentation for further details.

If you are using Select Pro or Select COM then the information passed to your server is signed and encrypted so that you can be confident that it came from Web-Merchant/WM and has not been tampered with. If you accept a call-back and are not using Select Pro we cannot guarantee that all calls to your call-back URL originate at Web-Merchant/WM. You will need to have additional checks to ensure that it relates to a valid payment.

You can set the call-back URL and specify that it be used for payment responses by using the page reached from the "Configuration Options" button for your installation on the WAS home page.

Email Receipt

An email receipt is sent to the address specified for the account that is receiving the payment. You can choose whether or not you wish to receive these email receipts via the account configuration options on WAS. You can supply a template for this email, using file upload and parameter substitution as described in Configuring your Installation. By default a standard email template will be used. [Note: this template is currently being defined].

Returning the response to the Shopper

Once a payment has been processed the shopper is returned a final response page and also an email, if the shopper provides an email address. Note that there is no guarantee that the shopper gets the email as we cannot guarantee the email address, but they will always get the response page.

Shopper's Response Page

You supply a page that is returned to the shopper once the payment has been processed. This page can either be the page returned in response to the merchant server call-back or a locally stored page that you upload to the Web-Merchant/WM server. The locally stored page should be named "resultY.html" for the page to use for a successful payment and "resultC.html" for a cancelled payment. If you do not supply a page via the call-back or your own page on the Web-Merchant/WM server then a standard page is used. This page will use your header and footer files, if you have provided any. You specify which behaviour you want via the installation configuration options on WAS.

Note: if you want the shopper to be able to return to your site easily after the purchase has been completed (the normal situation!), then you must ensure that an appropriate link is given on the response page.

Before being passed to the shopper this page is processed by Web-Merchant/WM for parameter substitution. This enables you to embed details of this particular transaction in the page. This page can also contain any graphics you wish. These graphics must be uploaded to the Web-Merchant/WM server even if the page is returned by the call-back to your server. Details of parameter substitution and use of graphics can be found in Configuring Your Installation. Note that you can use the file substitution tag to embed your standard header and footer into the result file. Here is a simple example of HTML for a resultY.html page: 

<html>
<head>
<title>Thank you for your payment</title>
</head>
<WPDISPLAY FILE=header.html DEFAULT="<body bgcolor=#ffffff>">
<h1>My Company Ltd.</h1>
<WPDISPLAY ITEM=name>, thank you for your payment of
<WPDISPLAY ITEM=amountString> for
<WPDISPLAY ITEM=desc>. Your goods will be shipped to
you within three working days.
<WPDISPLAY ITEM=banner>
<WPDISPLAY FILE=footer.html DEFAULT="</body>">
</html>

In addition, Web-Merchant/WM always inserts a standard "banner" containing certain information that Web-Merchant/WM must convey to the shopper. The banner is inserted into your page either at the position of the tag <WPDISPLAY ITEM=banner> or else directly after the <BODY> tag if the special tag is missing.

Shopper's Email Receipt

An email receipt is sent if the shopper supplies an email address. You can supply a template for this email, using file upload and parameter substitution as described in Configuring your Installation. By default a standard email template will be used. [Note: this template is currently being defined].
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