Yes, I finished the goEmerchant payment plugin for Magento and figured out how to use and modify Magento’s Order Management Workflow. It did require a lot of reverse engineering and a bit of tweaking of the button labels to improve the admin’s understanding on what each operation actually does.
Pre-Authorize transaction on Checkout:
So, the first thing we want to do is pre-authorize transactions when a user places an online order and checks out from Magento. That is relatively easy and mostly built in. Nothing needed to change from a workflow point of view. The only thing we had to realize is that there are two values that stay with the payment which is associated with the Order and we can use for the goEmerchant reference_number. Those are: ‘cc_trans_id’ and ‘last_trans_id’ – I chose to use ‘cc_trans_id’ just because it made more sense.
Cenceling & Voiding an Order:
In Magento you can only void invoices. However, if you create an invoice you in effect will triger the captur() method of the payment. Now, goEmerchant allows you to void only unsettled transactions – so we had to handle the voiding before we create an invoice. Luckily Magento has the cancel() method that is called when an order is canceled. So, we wired the void operation to the cancel() method and relabeled the button from ‘Cancel’ to ‘Cancel & Void’ – to explain what it actually does. We also turned off voiding, since there is not much sense in voiding an already created/settled invoice.
Settling a Transaction (Capture Funds):
goEmerchant needs the eCommerce application to send a ‘settle’ request when the order was processed, shipped, and invoiced. This request than places the transaction in the settled queue and will be processed usually at 2am. This was relatively easy and no modifications to the workflow needed here. All we needed to do is perform the ‘settle’ request in the capture() method of the payment. Note: since our module still allows Authorization & Capture setups, we had to handle the special cases here. But overall no problem.
Refund or Creditmemos:
Magento has this option to create new credit memos, these serve as what we call it as refunds. Luckily, here Magento’s Order Management Workflow works finde and allows you to process a credit memo and ‘Refund Online’. It is actualy labeled ‘Refund’ and the other option is to ‘Refund Offline’. So, in our plugin we are simply wiring the refund request in the refund() method of the payment. Note: Magento also allows a refund of the entire order which is not triggering anything. So, we will need to be cautious to explain to our merchants that they will need to refund already created invoices.
Conclusion
Magento’s Order Workflow is definitely rich in features and allows great level of flexibility for the merchants. However, some of it would not make sense and seems like overly complex for something that should be configurable but simple. We were able to get our plugin working the way we needed it to by a combination of using the existing functionality and relabeling some buttons. We will also need to caution our merchants from certain actions or make the decision to remove these options altogether.
If you are interested in our goEmerchant payment module for Magento, email us at info@activoinc.com or call at (888) 897-7775.
