Can I use API to Automate Posting Tracking Numbers to orders? - api

We ship using FEDEX and UPS, and we never found a need to post the tracking number to the payment record, however, recently a customer did a charge-back and the claim was that the order was not shipped even though it was. The tracking number was not entered into paypal, but we do have a tracking number for this order. Do we need to manually enter every tracking number into Paypal, or do we have a chance to enter it after a chargeback attempt has been made?

PayPal's standard API does not provide a field for tracking numbers in their order details, so there is no way to automatically send PayPal this information for all orders.
Their API supports disputes, so it could be possible, however it looks like it could be very messy. The workflow would look like this:
Use PayPal's Customer Disputes API to GET all disputes with a dispute_state of REQUIRED_ACTION and reason of MERCHANDISE_OR_SERVICE_NOT_RECEIVED. Save the Order ID
Cross reference the Order ID with your order management software's API to get a tracking number. If the tracking number exists,
Use PayPal's Customer Disputes API to escalate the dispute to a claim and save the returned claim API endpoint.
The documentation gets a little fuzzy here and may require some contact ith PayPal's support team, but it looks like you should be able to POST evidence to the claim with PROOF_OF_FULFILLMENT, which includes tracking_number and carrier_name.
Unless you are processing a high volume of these missing order claims it probably won't make sense to go through all this legwork. If it truly is taking a lot of time and energy for you or your staff to handle this specific type of PayPal dispute then maybe it would be worthwhile. I might also suggest in this case to start toggling the "signature required" settings for your shipping partners.

Related

Require 3rd party age verification in shopify

I have a requirement to do 3rd party age verification before I ship an order. I'm using a company called EVS for this. They released a shopify app recently, but seems partly baked. It requires a user to enter date of birth when registering for an account and then triggers the verification when the user places an order. The main problem with that is that it's rare for a customer to actually create an account before ordering for the first time -- instead they order first, then shopify emails them to create an account after the fact. Creating the account afterward does not allow the customer to enter DOB.
So I'm planning to implement my own solution. I can use EVS's API to run the verification by sending a combination of Name, Address, DOB, DL# and State, and last 4 of SSN. I have already built a proprietary order management system that pulls in customer and order data, and I can write a client to perform the verification.
I'm less savvy on the shopify side. I need to balance customer friction when placing an order for the first time, against having to do a lot of manual work for verification.
Below are the options I have conceived. Are there any other options? Any ideas for a better solution? Keep in mind I need to verify a customer once. I can tag the customer account as verified, and once verified it's business as usual.
Alter shopify templates to only show the checkout button when a user is logged in. If not logged in, show a "Create an account" button instead. That way the user provides DOB during account creation and the EVS app works as designed.
Set up a separate verification site like verify.my-domain.com. I can trigger an email to the customer upon order creation and ask them to verify. (May have issues with incorrect email addresses or spam filtering.)
If customer is not logged in, or account is not age verified, and they click Checkout, I can redirect them to a page. I can use a form on the page to do the verification. If verification passes, send them on to checkout.
For option 3, I don't know what shopify allows or what best practices allow. Can I use js to pass data to my own server on a different subdomain? Or post the form to another subdomain and then redirect back to shopify?
I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.
You have pretty much summed up all your options, to clarify on them a little:
You can require that customers create an account in the store checkout settings. /admin/settings/checkout
This would work, you could iframe it in too on a custom Page. Or, better, use cross-domain calls or jsonp.
This is a little convoluted and you would have to persist and maintain lot of external state. I'd avoid this
I think a combination of 1 and 2. Turn on "require customer account". Modify the customer account creation page. Implement a cross domain policy with your server which will host custom code leveraging the EVS API.
I'm not sure if you are selling tangible goods or not but with stringent policies on users' age you have to bear in mind that shipping addresses could change. For a tight integration you should look at having webhooks whenever a customer is changed and make sure all their data is still valid since their last EVS approval.
I've been looking into this quite extensively and we've spent a number of hours experimenting with options. Our client in this case is on Shopify Plus so we do have the benefit of access to checkout.liquid.
Our research has led us to believe that one cannot pass the required 'customer note' of the date of birth to the checkout should they be attempting to checkout as a 'guest'. Perhaps because the 'customer' does not yet exist.
Our options have been narrowed down to:
Write a custom backend app that allows Shopify and EVS to communicate directly (XML API on the EVS side) in the checkout process or just prior and then pass the verification status back to Shopify to allow the order to proceed, or append some relevant status marker for the fulfillment department to act accordingly. The EVS app doesn't prevent the order from proceeding, but does flag the customer's age as unverified in the Risk Level panel in the admin. This would be quite a substantial project and by no means low hanging fruit. There is also risk of re-doing a lot of what the EVS app does already and running into they same obstacles they did.
Force customers to register prior to checkout (if not signed in). This seems the most viable approach. The only caveat being that existing customers will not have the customer note (birth date) and we'd need to build a smaller backend app to allow them to append this to their customer account via the Shopify API (this cannot be done via liquid).
These are our findings and I'd love to know more about how you ended up approaching this.

Tracking transaction data from credit card, any API?

I am required to create an application which collects transaction details of bank accounts, there are APIs like
Plaid
Yodlee
Geezeo
But these APIs make use of the clients username and password for retrieving the transaction data, but in my case I need to do so using only the credit card number.
Can it even be done?
Is there any other APIs that provide this functionality?
I have researched about this issue a lot but still can't seem to find any APIs that suits the requirement. Any help is appreciated, Thank you.
I just answered essentially this question for another user (Serizawa Sanjay), here is my response below:
"
I have worked for Credit Unions that have experience with all these types of APIs. The Geezeo and the Yodlee API will not allow you to do what you want since that would violate the privacy on the card and the card issuers will not allow someone outside of the flow of approvals to get to that data. There are a few APIs that you can get by working with partners like FirstData to look for a certain type of transaction or vendor that comes across their system if it matches a certain card number, but you have to be a key partner with FirstData, not an easy task.
As far as aggregating transaction data from accounts like credit cards, bank accounts, auto loans, mortgages, investment accounts and the like, you really want to be using an API like MoneyDesktop. Yodlee is good as well, it just does not have the coverage, uptime, or quality of data that MoneyDesktop has. Geezeo's API just does not have the critical features that a MoneyDesktop or Yodlee API has. First Geezeo does not do its own aggregation and it only has one partner to do their agg for them. Yodlee is only one source, but if there is a broken connection, at least they can control fixing it. If a connection goes down with Geezeo, there is nothing that Geezeo can do to fix it but wait for their aggregation provider to fix it. If your business, bank or credit union can't afford for aggregation to go down (reputation risk), you need someone like Yodlee that controls their own aggregation, or someone like MoneyDesktop that has many aggregation providers and can route between them the second that one of their connections has problems. Also, Yodlee and MoneyDesktop both do their own data cleansing and aggregation, where Geezeo does not and has to rely on their aggregation provider. This is extremely problematic because as users editing and input to the system as to the transaction being data cleansed incorrectly or categorized incorrectly is not taken into account properly or optimally.
I have also heard that Intuit Data Services has a good API as well, but I have never had any experience with it.
Good luck!
"

variable monthly charges to users

I have a situation where I am to bill the site users monthly. But the invoice amount that is raised depends on the the leads that our site generates for his business. For example if the user gets 5 leads from my site and I charge him $10 per lead, at the end of month he will be charged $50. similarly leads might vary each month so will the amount.
Now I cant store his cc/ paypal credentials on my site for security reasons nor can I pre bill him or ask him to take credits and then use it. Please let me know the way to handle this situation. How can I handle this using paypal?
There are a few different ways to handle this, but I would recommend Preapproved Payments, which are part of the Adaptive Payments API.
With this method your users would create a profile with you (using the Preapproval API) when they first create their account on your site. That will give you a preapproval key that you can store with your user account. Then in the future when you need to bill them you can use the Pay API with the preapproval key to process funds immediately without further approval.
If you're working with PHP my class library for PayPal will make these calls very simple for you. You would just use the Preapproval.php template to setup the profiles for people, and then use PayWithOptions.php to process payments using the preapproval key(s) accordingly.
If you end up using it and need more help you can contact me directly for support.

subscription payment processing

Looking for some advice on which service to use to implement the following on my site:
I would like to sell 4 levels of subscriptions each to be billed on a monthly basis
The customer should be able to cancel their subscription at any time
The customer should be able to upgrade and downgrade their subscription at any time
I would like to keep the cost down until I have enough subscribers.
I have looked at Paypal but could not figure out how I can do requirements #3. Posting to their community forums yielded no response.
I am also located in Canada which seems to limit the options available to me.
I am currently looking at www.preedly.com and www.chargify.com but they seem to require a merchant account so I'd end up paying 2 service providers.
My site is written in PHP so a PHP-friendly solution is needed.
One last thing, I could not find a way to get Paypal to tell me the new subscription expiry date (following the successful processing of a transation) in order for me to update my customer table and lock out those who have not paid.
You may want to look into gettings a US based merchant account (I used to work for a merchant account provider and we were able to successfully establish merchant account for Canadian businesses. IIRC it required some hoops to be jumped through, though). If you can get a US merchant account you then can use Authorize.Net's Automated Recurring Billg (ARB) API. It allows you to create subscriptions and modify them accordingly (upadting and deleting).

Paypal for a buy/sell website

So I'm working on this website where users post their items, other users add some items to their cart and purchase them online.
The flow i was thinking about goes like this:
A merchant posts an item along with their credit cart/ paypal information.
A buyer adds items (from different merchants) to his/her shopping cart and purchases.
The buyer pays by filling a form that includes the payment method fields within the website's layout (no redirection to paypal).
The website will work as a gateway, it will capture the payments from the buyers and pays the merchants accordingly and automatically.
Is this possible using PayPal? if so, what API should I use?
Any input/idea is appreciated...
Thanks,
/t
I have also investigated using PayPal in this way for a site with a similar concept. Unfortunately, PayPal does not allow this. This makes you something known as a Third Party Payment Aggregator which drastically increases the risk associated with providing you a Merchant Account (which is what PayPal is doing). You can read more here.
Though, you could probably do it for a while before PayPal caught on, they could cancel at anytime leaving you high and dry. I recommend investigating Third Party Payment Aggregator solutions (Braintree has something that helps with this).
I guess it is. Use Paypal API
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/howto_api_reference
https://developer.paypal.com/