Some thoughts about failed/cancelled payments- According to the e-gold Shopping Cart Specification 6nov1999 the egold server only sumbits a form directly to the merchant's web server to indicate payment has been made. Which means the egold server does not tell you about failures or cancels and you have to hope the buyer does or check history. Has consideration gone into providing "Payment Transaction Form" or equivalent for failed/cancelled transactions? It is not uncommon to have the shopping cart or whatever software log the purchase as order "pending" before customer leaves for egold site (and include session info in baggage...) So if purchase was successfull using a md5 calculation the merchant can validate the integrity of the return on the "Payment Transaction Form" so merchant can be sure of a confirmed payment and the software can change order status from "pending" to "confirmed". I think it is important if the software is changing status to have egold server do the confirm and not rely upon customer browser. Now consider that the purchase was unsuccessfull or cancelled. The egold server does not send a "Payment Transaction Form" to confirm unsuccessfull nor to confirm cancelled. The customer/buyer should (but now always) follow hyperlink back carrying the "Buyer Alternate Return Form" If the customer comes back they come back with PAYMENT_BATCH_NUM=="0" and it could have been forged, we do not have a handshake_hash nor v2_has to be sure. we have to trust that no one would purposely forge a failed/cancelled transaction (would they? can anyone conceive of such a sitituation?). Then we have a choice if the buyer comes back to us to change order status from pending to cancel immediately or maybe throw up a page saying that order was not completed do you wish to cancel or retry... The other possibility is that customer gives up or never returns from the e-gold site, so now we have a order left in "pending"s status. At a minimum a human being or a very very clever script will have to check egold histories to see why an e-gold transaction got left pending. And then make a decision or email/phone customer and decide to cancel or ask customer to resubmit. Overall if manpower to contact buyer or more complexity in software for history check is worth it to make the sale for customers that bail/fail/cancel at egold then the situation is acceptable. The other thing that merchant software could do is to note that all pending orders that are older than say twenty minutes? have to be dead and either have/allow human to change status from pending to "failed" or "canceled" or have timed task, crontab, to expire and change pending to say "canceled" I believe that in the majority of transactions an expired "pending" is just accepted as cancelled for most e-gold merchants. And in the majority of transaction a buyers webrowser coming back as "failed or canceled, paybatchnum=0" would be not questioned as forged. I can't help thinking in the back of my mind that their may be a reason to want the e-gold server to submit directly to the merchant's server if it knew positively that the order was cancelled... But I'm not sure either... ...Also to consider having a reply for cancels would increase complexity on the e-gold sci also and just like taking extra napkins when not needed a taco bell or throwing away aluminum cans causes waste/inflation requesting services that are not needed will hurt all of us in the long run... - paul --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-tech as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
