[ic] Transaction ID and Payment gateway reference numbers

Louie Martinez neural at cerebrallab.com
Thu Dec 20 20:22:48 EST 2007


I'm cleaning up some of the nagging problems I have with my functioning
interchange webstore and thought I'd ask the list to see what others do
in this situation. Its a a small interchange/accounting problem.

I'm currently using 5.5.0 from back in january 2007 and the issue at
hand is passing along a usable reference number to cybersource that will
be helpful when doing the accounting.

As I understand it, a customer checks out and interchange sends out the
credit card verification requestion out to the payment gateway and
passes along the value stored in logs/tid.counter as the reference
number because the order has not been assigned an order number from
etc/order.number until the verification comes back from the payment
gateway with a successful authorization of the credit card.

So what happens is if you attempt to set both of the counters to the
same value, the counter in logs/tid.counter will slowly become out of
sync with the value in etc/order.number because tid.counter gets
incremented on every payment gateway transaction attempt...so failed
transactions still increase the tid.counter but not order.number.

At the end of the day I'm looking at my credit transactions for the day
and have to either try and match the interchange order with a very long
value created by the payment gateway which is stored in order_id field,
or try to match by name which can be cumbersome since I dropship for my
customers so the customer details of who order it doesn't necessarily
match up with the billing details of who is actually paying for it and
where it's going that is shown on cybersource's transaction logs.

However if the reference number was the same as the order number then
matching things up would be a breeze.

Now in older versions of interchange the order number counter was the
transaction id and an order would be generated before the authorization.
This would leave holes in your list of orders but at least your
reference number would match up for accounting purposes. This behavior
would be perfectly fine for me so that the reference number would match
up with the web order number.

I was wondering if anyone would know how I could either 1) revert 5.5.0
back to assigning an order number before credit authorization or 2)
which of the various files could be changed to grab the merchant
reference number sent back from a successful credit card authorization
and use that as the order number (meaning tid.counter sets the number
for the authorization...if it comes back successful, use that number as
the order number, ignoring etc/order.number entirely..maybe in
log_transactions?).

On a side note I have seen some mention of certain payment gateways
possibly supporting a capture feature where the initial order process
just ask for authorization and then when updating the order status of
the order and using "ship all lines", interchange sends a capture
request for that authorized card? If anyone does that with a particular
payment gateway I would most appreciate hearing from you about your
experiences with that particular payment gateway.

Thank you for your time.



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