Risk of using Payment GUIs with the WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in
This section provides important information to Customer Service Representatives or to anyone else involved in processing payments or credits in WebSphere Commerce.
Online transactions
If you use the WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in and Payment Rules to process transactions in an online fashion (for example, if you use the Cassette for BankServACH, Paymentech, or VisaNet), you should not use the menu options or graphical user interface panels that are provided in the WebSphere Commerce or WebSphere Commerce Payments GUIs to manipulate payment transactions or to edit payment-related information.
- If the online payment or credit transaction is processed successfully (whether it has a "Success" or "Failed" state), do not change the payment or credit information using the WebSphere Commerce GUI or WebSphere Commerce Payments GUI. If you do, data will not be synchronized between the WebSphere Commerce Payments and WebSphere Commerce Payments, and a data inconsistency will result.
For example, do not use the WebSphere Commerce Payments administration user interface to reverse an approval after the WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in has successfully processed an approve transaction. If you do use the WebSphere Commerce Payments administration user interface, the WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in will not be able to identify the correct state of payments. Because the WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in and WebSphere Commerce Payments use different forms of payment processing and have different levels of data persistence, the data can become unsynchronized.
- If the online payment or credit transaction is "pending," use the WebSphere Commerce Payments GUI (not the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator) to move the pending transaction to its next appropriate state ("Success" or "Failed"). The WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in will not be able to identify why the payment or credit is pending. To synchronize the data after moving the transaction forward, use the Payments menu in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to edit the transaction.
In the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, the Payments menu choices to list pending payments or list pending credits enable you to take action only on pending payments or credits that have been generated through use of the SimpleOffline plug-in, and not the WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in.
Offline transactions
If you use a payment cassette to record offline transactions (for example, the OfflineCard or CustomOffline cassette), you must use the WebSphere Commerce Payments GUI to modify payment transactions or to approve an order in WebSphere Commerce Payments.
When the SupportsOnlineTransaction property value is set to "no" in the PaymentSystemPluginMapping.xml file, the WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in creates WebSphere Commerce Payments orders using the approve action, and sets the transaction to the pending state to forbid orders from moving forward.
When money is collected offline, a Customer Service Representative has two choices:
- Use the WebSphere Commerce Payments GUI to approve the order (or use the sale function) - a good choice.
The WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in will use the Query API to query the approved information from the WebSphere Commerce Payments component and data will be synchronized between WebSphere Commerce Payments and the WebSphere Commerce Payments plug-in.
- Use the Payments menu in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator to edit the pending payments or credits - a bad choice.
This choice should not be selected because it will cause the data that is updated in the WebSphere Commerce Payments to not be synchronized with data in WebSphere Commerce Payments. The WebSphere Commerce Payments order will still exist, but it will not contain any payment information. Therefore, when using an offline payment cassette (such as the OfflineCard or CustomOffline payment cassette), do not use the Payments menu in the Accelerator to move pending payments or credits to an approved state.
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