[ic] Integrating a new payment mechanism

[Daniel Gardner]

Hi All,

I'm not really sure where to start this. In fact I'd not really
sure where to start at all, which is why I'd sending this mail ;)

It's become my responsibility to look into the possibilities of
integrating Beenz with Interchange. if you don't know what beenz
is, it's "A New Kind Of Money" - or at least that's what the
marketing people call it ;) "Consumers" earn beenz by doing things 
like filling out web forms or signing up for spam, and there's a
load of things that they can spend the beenz on. "Merchants" give
"Consumers" beenz, and different merchants take the beenz away
later. Check out www.beenz.com to get an idea ;)

So, one of our customers (a merchant) wants to set up a special
shop (what i think is called a catalog in Interchange-talk)
where they can offer products which can be redeemed for beenz.

We do have standard ways that they can do this, but we (everyone
in dev) think that it would be far nicer if we could write
something to let Interchange natively do it.

I see that there's a few different credit-card modules to use
different payment gateways, but i don't think that they're
exactly what i need. obviously good things to look at, but not
quite there ;)

I admit freely that i now have about 4.5 hours knowledge of
Interchange (except for having heard that minivend was pretty
good) and I'd not really sure where i should start looking for
where to integrate stuff. There's a fair amount of code there!

What would be really cool would be if i could add beenz in as an
option for all products, so that a special shop doesn't need to
be created at the merchant's end - something like "how would you
like to pay - credit card, check or beenz"

The way i see the flow going would be something like: 
 o User goes to checkout, clicks the "beenz" option 
 o enters beenz username and password 
 o "Magic Beenz Module" does the transaction
 o Confirm to user

I'm hoping to be able to send any code that i come up with back
to you... but i really do need some pointers as to where to start
first!

Hopefully someone's read this and they're now thinking that it
sounds ridiculously easy ;)

Any ideas??!

TIA,
dan

--
Daniel Gardner

Core development
beenz.com