eCommerce

Choosing a Canadian Credit Card Payment Processor

ethan — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:59:17 -0500

Recently I've undertaken researching various options for accepting credit card payments for Camp NeeKauNis, a non-profit organization I'm heavily involved in. We wanted to be able to accept donations and camp fees through our website, moving from mailed-in paper registrations and cheques to online registration and payment.

On the site side, CiviCRM provides us will all of the functionality we need - all that it needs is a payment processor. CiviCRM already supports a number of processors - PayPal, Google Checkout, Moneris, Authorize.net and more.

Ubercart, a Drupal module designed to add e-commerce to websites, is our de facto choice for adding such a feature. I've investigated the support for these payment processors out-of-the-bod - of course, you can always create your own module to support a new processor.

Please use this for reference only - it may be out of date, incorrect or otherwise. This is simply the information I received during the course of my research, conducted early January 2009. If you have updated information or additional providers, please comment below.

	Paypal Website Services Standard	Paypal Website Services Pro	Moneris eSelectplus (Updated Apr 2009)	Moneris Phone-in
Enables	Online processing through on PayPal's site	Online processing on your site	Online processing on your site	Offline processing via telephone
Setup Fee	None	None	$450	$275
Monthly Fee	None	$30 USD	$40 + $7	$15
Per transaction Fee	$0.30 USD	$0.30 USD	$0.15	$0.15
Percentage Fee	1.9-2.9% based on volume	1.9-2.9% based on volume	2.9%	2.95%
Discounted percentage fee for non-profit organizations	2.2%	2.2%	None	None
Phone, fax, mail orders (non-online)	None	Included	Included	Exclusively
CiviCRM support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Ubercart support	Yes	Yes	With contributed module	With contributed module

OctopusBooks.ca Site Upgrade

Ron — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:46:44 -0400

We recently upgraded the OctopusBooks.ca website from Drupal 4 to 5. In the process, we decided to upgrade the eCommerce module to the new Ubercart 1.0 shopping cart. There are many flexible product and shipping options available in Ubercart and the whole shopping process is more slick and simple.

New blocks were added to take showcase the in-house and aggregated content that had been added to the website but was not being highlighted. The blocks ranging from 'News' to 'Reviews' were randomized to give the site a fresh look each visit.

As well, we decided to rid the site of the categories module which was under-utilized and problematic for other modules. Going back to the taxonomy module means simpler category control.

You can browse for books and news at the new website:
http://www.octopusbooks.ca

Upgrade to Ubercart and removal of Categories module

Ron — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:52:43 -0400

We decided to upgrade our websites from the ecommerce module to the new Ubercart 1.0 shopping cart.

Ubercart (http://www.ubercart.org) simplified the order taking process and has a very customizable checkout, shipping and tax settings. We were even able to charge GST tax on shipping! The one page checkout is great and calculated the shipping on the fly as you enter your shipping address. It will even automatically create an account for you so you can view your order status or print an invoice (or download a file).

As well, we decided to rid the site of the categories module which was under-utilized and problematic for other modules. Going back to the taxonomy module means simpler category control.

Sometimes it is best to drop problematic modules. With drupal there are always new modules in the works, or old ones being upgraded. Patience is a virtue in website development.

You can browse for books and news at the new website: http://www.octopusbooks.ca

Custom Shipping for Drupal eCommerce

stevem — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:46:08 -0400

The e-commerce module for drupal allows custom plugins to handle shipping calculations. There are some complex plugins that allow querying of the US and Canadian Post offices for live rates based on the size and weight of packages, etc. etc.

But not everyone needs elaborate shipping tools. There has been a certain amount of complaining on the Drupal forums about the need for simple shipping modules. I had to write a fairly simple such module recently, and found it relatively easy to do.

We re-launched Octopus Books as a Drupal site not so very long ago. Their shipping scheme is quite simple: there's a tiered set of shipping costs for the first, second, and subsequent books, and a Canadian and an International version of each rate. Oh, and some books, marked "heavy" are charged an additional rate, and counted first when calculating shipping.

All that logic lives in a single script, which defines the admin menus, creates additional fields for the items (in this case, a "heavy item" checkbox), and does the shipping calculations.

The code is attached, and the file (named *.inc) is dropped into /modules/ecommerce/contrib/shipcalc/partners/, which makes it available on the ecommerce shipping admin page.