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Old 11-25-2012, 08:01 AM
 
carpeperdiem carpeperdiem is offline
 

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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: New York City, USA
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Default Re: Black Friday hell - X-payments designed for (by) geeks

Thank Alex.
I apologize for the heat and the drama -- but my black friday was truly insane with customer service issues. I'm just recovering.

You should know that I am actively working with Bill Brewer to integrate x-payments iframe into Altered Cart's CheckoutOne. In my opinion, CheckoutOne is a superior checkout experience for the customer (vs. X-Cart's default OPC w/ajax) and it "simply" will display the x-payments iframe. The solution will be to edit the x-payments template and css - but since the "lite interface" is hidden deep in js, it is not as simple as a template edit.

[side note and OT: there is nothing "one page" about x-cart's one page checkout" - since it requires multiple submits. maybe rename it to"two-step checkout" ? The reason Altered Cart's checkoutOne is a better user experience is that it solves the "next step" issues -- it's all on one page]

X-payments and XPC connector should make the visual aspects of the iframe accessible to the developer, and we should also have all the hooks as $vars. In the name of security, x-payments has obfuscated itself into unusable.

Yes, I saw your PM, but I didn't notice anything different. Maybe iFrame actually works now? I don't consider a 1.1 release worthy of the ".1" if it's simply bug fixes. I'll take another look in case I missed something.

I know you inherited this mess. But the bug fixes that are required are not major. It does require someone familiar with the code to do the (relatively minor) work.

I do not want to deal with xcart tech support. This is not an isolated issue. It's a product design defect that really needs to be addressed ASAP. My alternative is to not use x-payments and use a merchant account that has an iframe gateway. That's possible for me since my merchant account doesn't have a multi-year contract. But not all merchants can jump ship.

It is very obvious that 100% of xcart's resources in the design and coding of x-payments went to the security and PCI code, and zero resources went to user interface. After all this time, did you ever wonder why substantial number of the "NFR" x-payments licenses were never used and you have to do the "use it or lose it" annulled licenses? I can assure you that there would be widespread adoption of x-payments if it simply solves basic customer interface issues. You are very close to making it work -- I bet that one engineer who knows the code could fix it in 2 hours. BUT you have to provide the hooks to the developer to customize it for each store (images, css, $vars, etc..) Too much of x-payments is hidden in the name of security.

I wasn't part of your x-payments beta because I was in a multi-year contract with my merchant account and I had no intention of upgrading my store at the time. I figured I'd give you a year or 2 to get it right... that's why I am truly astonished that a shipping product at version 1.0.5 is still not ready for production.

AH, but that's why you have the project now, yes?

I will present my shopping list to you in PM. It's not complicated. An engineer who knows the code can probably knock it out quickly.

Thanks for listening.

Jeremy
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xcart 4.5.4 gold+ w/x-payments 1.0.6; xcart gold 4.4.4
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