Following the successful launch of the previous project, a rewrite of the press release submission process to include the ability to submit pictures with press releases, my next project is due to start soon.
It should be fairly straight forward: the brief is to ‘enable people to pay for their press releases online, via a credit card.’
Up till now, payment has mostly been by invoice. A release would be submitted to the distribution system and before putting online and emailing out, a check would be made to see if the submitter is known. If so, then an invoice is raised at the beginning of the following month. If it is a new customer they are phoned and requested to make payment via credit card. Not a perfect system and it requires the customer to give their card details over the phone.
There are a few caveats with taking payments online which I’m looking into at the moment. The main concern is that an invoice will be required ‘there and then’. Currently the accounting system can do ad-hoc invoices – manually – however it’s mainly geared for a once a month run. If we do require immediate invoices (I have a document from HMRC to peruse to determine this) then this project could extend a fair bit beyond the original spec.
All in all, it’s looking to be an interesting undertaking. I’ve worked with the Datacash API before, but never directly with the bank’s own interfaces.