Sunday 9 June 2013

SagePay Server Integration the Easy Way Part (1 of 3)

SagePay Integration the Easy Way

I was recently asked to integrate a billing platform for a product that my company was selling to a client.  After evaluating several different payment gateways such as PayPal, Google Cart and RealEx Payments I decided to settle on SagePay.

PayPal and Google Cart offer brilliant integration scripts with a vast knowledge base for help.
RealEx was a rather poor system in that it offered virtually no support to developers.  I had even found flaws in several parts of their documentation that took 3 days for them to confirm.  Many developers can agree this is a waste of time when projects have deadlines.

So I decided to integrate SagePay.

SagePay for those of you who do not know acts as a simple payment Gateway for processing transactions.  It does not store shopping carts it also has a good title as it is linked in part to the Sage Software Company.

SagePay has 3 Types of Integration
  • Forms
  • Sever
  • Direct
  • Token
After viewing their samples for each of these I decided that Server would offer the best integration with most functions however it would also remove the onus on the eCommerce company to need numerous security checks.

From experimenting from their examples I found that most code was repetitive however it was heavily engrained in each of their sample forms with no actual Code Library to Use.

Over the next 3 posts throughout the week I will show how to integrate with SagePay through a small .dll library I have created.  As well as storing the information about these transactions to the database.

Keep Tuned.