Payment gateways for web sites in South Africa

This article is about the pains and difficulties that I’ve experienced in trying to integrate ZenCart with a (credit Card) payment gateway in South Africa.  There has been a lot of talk about which shopping cart software to use (ZenCart, VirtueMart, osCommerce, Comersus, CubeCart, WHMCS, WP eCommerce, UberCart).  I’ve decided to use ZenCart and VirtueMart – mainly because I’ve needed them integrated into a Content Management System (CMS) – but that’s another story.



The criteria for choosing a payment gateway were (in order of priority):
* Based in South Africa
* easy (or cheap, off-the-shelf) integration with ZenCart
* low or zero monthly charges
* no charges until the site went into production
* competitive commissions on credit card transactions
* competitive per transaction fees

Our e-commerce site was going to be a low volume site to start with – so the monthly costs were the scary part and I was on the lookout for a zero monthly fee gateway…

When designing my e-Commerce site, I Google’d around and saw that there seemed to be a working, off-the-shelf integration module for ZenCart-and-NetCash and some reviews saying that it was a relatively easy integration.

The MacGeek site had a discussion “Payment gateways for websites in South Africa – a crowdsourcing experiment” that brought together some frustrated developers trying to find the best services. 
There was also a ZenCart plugin to NetCash for R100 and others – but that site and software is no longer available (or didn’t work?).  Various people complained that although the plugin processed the payment, it did not record the payment or the order in the order page in the ZenCart admin page, it did not send an email detailing the order to the administrator or the client, so a payment is made without knowledge of the administrator. VERY frustrating.

PayPal is an option – especially with FNB’s announcement that it would be representing PayPal in South Africa – but when?  For now – I looked around and here’s what I found:

 
The http://ecommerce-guide.co.za/ has very useful information and this is where I think I started smiling :)
The article “New developments on the super merchant front and announcement of PayPal launch in SA” lists a few options: PayFast: offering credit card payment facility and a PayFast voucher system to their existing instant EFT and Ukash payment options and also offer free payment modules – see below for links to download them for free!  

Setcom have separated and rebranded their services and their super merchant service is now called MonsterPay. Setcom is now solely the credit card payment gateway service for online retailers with bank merchant accounts, and SID (or Secure Instant Deposit) is their web-based instant EFT service.


 


PayFast have free payment modules (click to download them) for ZenCart 1.3.8a, VirtueMart 1.1.3, VirtueMart 1.0.15,  osCommerce 2.2, CubeCart 4.3.0, CubeCart 3.0.18, WHMCS 4.1.2, WP eCommerce 3.7.5.
I must say, PayFast have HTT’s endorsement for a very well thought out web site – very informative and I had my ZenCart integrated with PayFast’s payment gateway in less than 2 hours!  Free driver, well written “Integration Guide” with test logins and passwords available on the web site – wonderful!  (Hat-tip to the technical team @ PayFast).  Oh, and their driver worked flawlessly – with a gr8 ZenCart install package.  This is the only driver that HTT actually installed and tested – no need to look any further – unless one of the other vendors would like me to do that for them?
Rates are very good too – with no monthly fee, no setup fee.  Just a transaction fee (R2) and competitive commission (4.9%). Excl. VAT.


Mygate have free payment modules (click to download them) for OsCommerce, Joomla with VirtueMart Version 1.0.12, Joomla with VirtueMart Version 1.5.3, Cube Cart, Cube Cart version 4, ZenCart, Comersus



Setcom have free payment modules for OsCommerce module and ZenCart module.
BUT, fees: there’s a monthly fee (R250), setup fee (R250).



PayGate have free payment modules: OSCommerce,  ZenCart, VirtueMart, Drupal Ubercart, CS-Cart
Pricing is provided on request (after filling out a form – WTF!)

NetCash: As mentioned above, this is where I started my journey – thinking that there was a cheap (R100) plugin for NetCash and ZenCart – but, when I tried it, I was horribly disappointed.  I landed up wasting a few long frustrating nights doubting my ZenCart (and php) skills.  The plugin processed the payment, BUT it did not record the payment nor the order in the order page in the ZenCart admin page, and it did not send an email detailing the order to the administrator or the client, so a payment is made without knowledge of the administrator. VERY frustrating.  It was then that I started looking for another driver and came across these other free payment modules.  The other vendors have woken up to the need to make integration to their gateways a painless (and seamless) exercise. 
NetCash – here’s some constructive advice: best you wake up and provide drivers similar to the quality of PayFast - else I doubt whether you’ll get very many eCommerce sites connecting up.
Fees: R160 monthly fee (only kicks in after your first real transaction); R1.00 per transaction; Commission on Credit Card transactions 5.0%


 
Moneybookers: Also has free integration modules.  See here for the list
Fees are very low too: 2.9%: Merchant fees  and other rates
No monthly fees, no setup charges.

Joomla! site pains and the solutions that worked for me: “Error 500”, “Error 404.2” - The White Screen of Death

I was playing around and trying to turn on a SEF module in Joomla! then everything stopped working :(
Not sure if the SEF and the problems were related, but my Joomla! site gave errors and even showed blank pages (white screen of death).
It seemed like some files were not accessible so I tried to change the file permissions but that didn’t help - “500 'SITE CHMOD 777 modules': command not understood”.  Seemed like that’s correct when running on Microsoft IIS (version 6).

I then thought that these files were the problem since I couldn’t open them: .htaccess .htgroup and .htpasswd


The I asked the webmaster to check the site and he found a problem: “each site running PHP has to have a specific mapping to the php5isapi.dll file and for some reason, this was changed to point to the php.exe file. ”

Here’s a nice article that helped check the settings on IIS 6: How To Install PHP on IIS 6.0 

I have found a way of turning on error logging on the index page’s screen (from “The White Screen of Death (Completely Blank Page)”
Just temporarily edit your index.php file (normally located in your Joomla! root directory) directly after the first opening PHP tag to add the following:
===============
<?php

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', TRUE);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', TRUE);

===============

I’ve turned it on and I think this will give clues as to what’s going on.  So far there’s a file that’s not accessible – now to contact the web master to see what’s going on with that file’s accessibility



Are you a ZenCart page designer?
Turning on error logging for ZenCart php would also save lots of time: enable_error_logging.php
Extracted from: Debug Error-Logging Utility for PHP and Zen Cart:

Installing the debug error-logging tool will create debug logs of PHP problems for you to review.
Be sure to remove the utility when not needed, or it will slow down your site and consume large amounts of disk space.

** HOW TO USE: **
1. Download and unzip the utility
2. Upload the enclosed enable_error_logging.php file to the /includes/extra_configures/ folder.
3. Test the page on your site that is having problems -- ie: trigger whatever symptom is ailing you.
4. Open the latest log file /cache/myDEBUG-xxxxxxx.log to see the list of any PHP errors that occurred while the page/test was running.
5. Be sure to delete the enable_error_logging.php file from the /includes/extra_configures folder when done (or rename it to .php1 instead of .php )

Update on 28Mar2010:
If you are getting errors trying to integrate ZenCart with PayPal’s express checkout: error “10413 Transaction refused because of an invalid argument. See additional error messages for details. - The totals of the cart item amounts do not match order amounts.”  See here for how to solve it by modifying the paypalwpp.php file: Configuring ZenCart and PayPal: Error 10413 solved

Free domain and web hosting (R0.00) no credit card needed

Yes, I’ve just registered and created my own domain and web site 100% free using 000WebHost.  Here’s what’s included:
1,500MB disk space, 100GB traffic per month, 5x email addresses, WebMail, PHP, 2x MySQL databases, FTP, cPanel, weekly backups, cron jobs…

There are no hidden costs, no adverts, and no restrictive terms.  Lighting fast speeds, maximum reliability and fanatical user support are just a few of the features you'll receive.

I’m going to create an e-commerce site using Joomla and VirtueMart for a friend who runs a business from home – no start-up fees nor monthly costs – gr8 :)

The web site setup process asks if you want a free (sub-)domain and it creates that for you instantly (yoursite.comli.com)

Click on the image below for more info:


There’s no ssh access, so I’m going to use two Joomla components called JoomlaPack to zip my files, and JoomlaXplorer to unzip via the GUI.

Wow, and I was going to suggest to my friend to pay R100 per month for a basic hosting package…

Is there a catch?  Let me know please – comment or email me HandyTechTipper at gmail.com