A few months back one of my clients had expressed an interest in changing his Payement Gateway options on his website.
This particular client sells services through his website and offers his users to pay via Paypal. A high number of those clients pay via Credit Card through Paypal. After some analysis of his Google Analaytics, what I found is that a significant number of his clients had ordered his service, proceeded to Paypal checkout and then did not proceed to finalize the transaction. 
Its fair to say that the service he sells if fairly competitive, so he was missing out on a number of potential clients, and his checkout process was not helping the situation.
He asked for my assistance to simplify the checkout process.
From a business point of view, he wanted to move away from Paypal and look at something more local to Australia that was SISD compliant. I gave him and estimate with a few options for payment processing and he came back to me after a few days and had settled on SecurePay. This is the Australian SecurePay company, a business of Australia Post. SecurePay claim they are specialists in eCommerce, bill presentment and payment processing.
I had never worked with them before, and was fairly optimistic as they were a local brand and an Australian Icon. I made some inquiries and they emailed me their Direct Post Integration Guide and also the test account details. This was a great start as my solution was to develop a payment gateway plugin for his WordPress site.
The Integration guide was quite helpful, and like many API’s had sufficient documentation to develop the plugin. When I was ready for testing, I struck a problem with the callback EPS_RESULTURL function. It kept sending the response “An Error Occurred Your payment was Approved but an error occurred trying to display the result page. Error code 404”
Ok no problem, I shot off an email to [email protected] detailing the problem. The first concern here was that 3 days had gone by and I did not receive a reply. My client was anxious so he contacted his account manager at Securepay. I then got a reply the following day asking me for information about the problem. Since I had already provided all the information in my initial email, I started to get concerned. I sent them this information again, and I received a reply 6 hours later explaining how it should work. Well, I agreed it should work also, but it did not work as described and I got the feeling that this was not getting anywhere.
I sent of another response the following day, asking specifically if he could point out in my code what I was doing wrong. The following day I got a reply from customer support saying they had replicated the issue to do with the RedirectURL and they had passed it on to their development team to resolve. Another 2 days had passed and my anxious client had instructed my to go with option B and put on-hold SecurePay.
Option B was with a competing company called eWay. It was pretty much the same process, they have a developer platform with good documentation. I completed the development and testing and it all worked with ease. I dealt with their support who responded within the hour. It was a very positive experience.
My client finally got what he was after, he was pleased with his Analaytics results and saw much more completed transactions, I got paid and it was close to Christmas, and I ran right out beer, so the timing was great.
Another 2 weeks had gone by and I thought I would chase up the issue with SecurePay as I had not heard back from them. 3 days after that I got a reply “We currently have this fixed in our development environment, this means we should be able to push this out with our next release to our production environment which is currently scheduled for mid January. I will let you know once we have a definitive date”
2 months had passed SecurePay has not contacted me with a definitive date. Did I expect them to ? NO, From the time I sent my support ticket in, I knew pretty much what type of of company I was dealing with.
Would I recommend SecurePay? Without a doubt NO. Perhaps they should stick to delivering snail mail.
