BankAccount.credit & BankAccount.debit -- deprecated or not? - balanced-payments

The BalancedPayments 1.1 documentation talks about using Customers and Orders as core transaction objects, but for our application, it's not particularly necessary or useful (our model is not a marketplace of buyers and sellers). We'd just like to directly credit/debit to/from BankAccounts.
It currently works, but the credit and debit apis have been removed from the online docs. Is my project at risk unless I implement Customer and Order?

Those methods, themselves, are not deprecated, but marketplaces are now required to use orders. That means the order parameter needs to be supplied in those requests. Since Orders are required and Orders are created on "merchant" Customer instances, the use of Customer is also required. Orders and Customers are very useful, https://www.balancedpayments.com/account-reconciliation.
Feel free to drop by #balanced on Freenode IRC or email support#balancedpayments.com with additional questions.

Related

Downloading all transactions from Xero to reproduce General Ledger

I'm trying to use the Xero API to download all transactions to reproduce the general ledger in an external system so I can use it to reconcile figures within that system.
So far, I've got it downloading invoices, bank transactions, manual journals and credit notes, but it looks like bank transactions that are allocated as a payment against an invoice don't show up in the bank transactions API call. Is this correct or am I missing something?
If I do need to download Payments, there doesn't seem to be a paging method. Is this correct or am I missing something here?
Also, is there anything else that I need to download that might affect net movement on the general ledger?
Regarding the missing payments in bank transactions, this answer should help.
The Payments endpoint doesn't have paging according to the docs, just the If-Modified-Since header.
For our external system we started with the Journals endpoint (which should have everything that adjusts the GL) and supplemented it where needed with additional fields from other endpoints depending on the source type.

Shopify - New order using the Shopify API - how to know tax and shipping?

We have built an e-commerce web application (Node backend, Vue frontend). We process the payment using Stripe, but many brands have asked us if the order and inventory control can be done in Shopify. We are trying to figure out the best way integrate a payment module into Shopify so that the brand can manage the fulfilment and inventory through Shopify.
It seems we should use the Order API to create an order and mark it as paid. But how do we know that the product is in stock, and what are the cost for shipping and tax from Shopify when creating the order? I think we can use the Product API to get inventory levels, but where is the shipping and tax endpoints?
If I understand the Order API correctly, we need to tell Shopify what are the shipping costs and tax costs, when a new order is created. Is that right? How could we possibly know those figures? Seems like there should be an endpoint to calculate shipping costs and get a product's tax rates so that we can then pass those figures back into the Order API. Am I missing something?
I thought maybe we are supposed to create an order that has financial_status: pending first to get shipping and tax rates back (does it even give you those?), then update the order to either cancel_reason: customer or cancel_reason: inventory if those rates are too expensive and the order is declined? But surely we need to know what shipping methods are available to the customer in order to tell Shopify which one to use, right? Or does it by default choose the cheapest one when creating an order?
Notes:
We know the customers shipping address
We don't know where the product is warehoused (Shopify does I think)
We don't know the weights or dimensions of the product (Shopify does I think)
This answer is a little bit late, but i hope, i can help others that are struggling with the same issue.
First i would recommend to set up all Shipping Rates and Taxes in Shopify. There are plenty of manuals to achieve this:
https://help.shopify.com/manual/taxes#general-process-to-set-up-taxes
https://help.shopify.com/manual/shipping/rates-and-methods/calculated-rates
After this there are different possibilities to calculate your shipping and tax cost.
Your shipping cost can you get via the active_shipping API, which can be found here:
https://github.com/Shopify/active_shipping
Or the following Shopify Application: https://apps.shopify.com/boxify
However, you may need to know size and storage location for theese solutions.
The taxes can you get via the country in the Admin API, there is a specific key-value pair for this:
https://help.shopify.com/api/reference/country
I hope that's enough information to get closer to solving the issue, for at least someone.

Big Commerce Integration for custom Email Invoice

I've looked into different ways to put or get order info from BC to different systems including the BC API, BC Webhooks, Zapier, and other systems like Shipworks.... in the end what I need to do is this:
We need orders placed on BigCommerce to send out a special invoice to the customer. The items that the customer purchased will have custom attributes, a "Tier" and a separate "Unit QTY" which is not the same as the item quantity.
We need to group the items by Tier, and show subtotals of the Unit Qty and Cost. Send this in an invoice as soon as the order is placed on the website.
We are already syncing to Quickbooks online, which does not have the functionality.
Looking for suggestions on different platforms/languages/email services like mailgun/and even shipping integration tools like shipworks, ordoro etc. that might have the ability to code a custom email template like this.
My customer is keeping bigcommerce, no option to switch this out.
I am mainly a Salesforce developer so my strong suit would be to sync the orders to SFDC and code in apex, send the invoice. But before investing in the time, wanted to see if I'm missing some quick potential solutions.
Anyone use Zapier Javascript/Python code platform?
Apologies if this is too open-ended. I feel that this could be a good reference for others in the community about options and best practices.
Hmm your question is pretty broad. Maybe a few links to API documentation could help?
Bigcommerce API - https://developer.bigcommerce.com/api
Ordoro API - https://www.ordoro.com/developer
Send this in an invoice as soon as the order is placed on the website.
I think what you need is a Bigcommerce webhook for store/order/created. See https://developer.bigcommerce.com/api/webhooks-getting-started.
Alternatively, you could set up a cron job that polls BigCommerce for new orders and then sends the email notification.

POST Order with values for configurable product fields?

I've successfully got 3rd party merchant orders posting new orders to my client's BigCommerce store programmatically. I've even got product options posting as part of the order (product->option set-> option relationships are a total cluster).
My client relies heavily on configurable fields. I'm able to pull the definitions of the configurable fields for each product, but can't find a way to POST or update the configurable field values through the API.
Is it possible to manipulate an order's configurable fields through the API?
Got a response from the support team # BigCommerce. Manipulating configurable fields via the API is not currently possible and not currently on the roadmap.
Original reply below:
Unfortunately that is a product limitation with the API, it will not tie to configurable fields on the product. The best you can do is attach that information through a generic text field like 'staff_notes'. Honestly I have not heard of any talk of adding a way to add products with configurable fields to orders via the API. I think this may be because anything that can be done with configurable fields can be done with options and options are what is being pushed for the future. I have noted this feedback down though and will pass it along to our Product Manager for the API. Best case scenario is that it may be seen in a future version of the API which is at least several months away.

Rails: Using Paypal to faciliate marketplace transactions (parallel or chained?)

I want to build a marketplace site where my application connects a 'buyer' and a 'seller' and takes a commission (%) in the process.
I've checked out Adaptive payments API on Paypal and have seen 'parallel payments' as well as 'chained payments'.
However, what I would like to do is make it seem like the buyer is interacting directly with the seller, with my application taking a commission.
I know with parallel payments (Adaptive Payments API) it's possible for the 'sender' to see the 'primary recipient' which in this case would be the seller. In chained payments the buyer would see my application as the 'middle man' (and as the middle man I could take commission). So what I'm kind of looking for is something of a mix between the two. Any ideas?
My other idea is to use a parallel payment and have my application as the second recipient (taking % commission)?
How do marketplace sites do this? Any rails-specific tips would be much appreciated too - i've seen there is a Paypal Adaptive Gem which I could use?
I'm a rails noob and this is my first project.
Adaptive Payments allows you to separately specify who pays the fees and who the primary receiver is. In a chained payment flow, only the primary receiver is shown to the buyer.
In short; yes, Adaptive Payments will perfectly suit your needs.
You can get additional info from PayPal directly by filing a ticket with Developer Technical Services at https://www.paypal.com/dts/
Found this gem which let's you use Paypal's adaptive payments in your Rails application.
To make it seem like the buyer is interacting directly with the seller, I've discovered you need to do a 'chained payment' and specify the seller as the 'primary receiver'.
Your 'business/application' can take it's commission by acting as a secondary receiver. To do so you simply add it as a receiver but set :primary => false. When the buyer tries to make a purchase, it'll show the seller's Paypal email address so it looks like you're buying directly. Take a look at the documentation for the gem and you'll see it's pretty straightforward.
The amount sent by the buyer is split up between the receivers (which you can specify in your code). Hope this helps.