We switched from SECPay, after 10+ years of finding it pretty good but had no choice as it's being withdrawn. We chose WorldPay and have been very disappointed. For anyone that might be considering them, you might want to bear in mind the following we have found over about a month of using it live:
- If you take cart orders as Auth-Only then their Bulk Capture might be attractive (like the Batch Capture offered by PayPal, which is pretty good). However, their Bulk Capture display doesn't include any way of showing customer names! This seems absolutely fundamental so for it to be missing is crazy IMHO. The display includes the cart's order id, their transaction id, and other stuff, but no names of any kind. That makes it useless for us. We moaned a month ago and are still chasing in the hope it might be something they can in another column.
- Again, if you do Auth-Only in your cart, being able to adjust the amount to charge the customer during a manual capture is also dead basic. The field with WorldPay is read-only!!! We moaned a month ago, after spending about an hour on the phone/on hold to their Tech Support, twice, and are still chasing in the hope we can get to allow us to edit the amount.
- Their Tech Support is pretty useless! You get bounced around and mostly told to send an e-mail.
- Sending e-mails to them have to come from authorised contacts, fair enough, except we use e-mail aliases to cover 3 of us so our official 'from' address doesn't always match and e-mails from my guys are rejected. Asking their Tech Support to add additional contacts took a month, and one of my team has now replaced my address as the prime technical contact. It seems that you can only have one 'additional' contact. Who knows how large companies can use this sort of thing...
- Their PayByLink facility looked appealing. The sort of thing you'd expect on a modern Payment Gateway. It kind of works, but you can't tell afterwards if the links have been paid!!! they have a Search, but it always shows status as Created, and never Paid, even though we know some have been paid. You have to rely on the e-mails that come through. Oh, and they get sent to the primary contact address for the whole account and not to the address we set up for confirmations! We've asked for that to be fixed, with another Tech Support exchange. I'm not holding my breath.
- They didn't tell us there would be a monthly minimum charge applying to the facility to have PayByLink as well as the main e-Commerce transactions. I moaned and they said they'd set the min charge to zero. I'm still hoping we get a refund of the additional charge they hit us with before we spotted it.

All in all, for such a large and apparently established company and payment gateway, we've found Worldpay (in the UK) to be rubbish, frankly. It took ages to get it live and I'm wishing we hadn't bothered, now.

So, we are now looking for alternative gateways in the UK. From what I've read here, Stripe and SquareUp seem to be the best regarded. Pay360 seems to be regarded as very expensive and also with bad Tech Support. We already use PayPal and don't want all card payments to also go through hem/Braintree. It's a bug shame that Authorize.net isn't available in the UK.

If anyone has any warnings or other suggestions given that we do Auth-Only and want things like bulk capture, adjustable capture amounts, and payable links plus sensible reporting with daily batch totals that include all types, I'd be very grateful. Thanks in advance :-)


Pragmasis Limited
https://SecurityForBikes.com

Hi Stephen

Stripe is the only provider on my brothers website & it's been faultless. He deals with new contractors plant machinery & most of the payments are in the thousands of £s & the payouts are always on time too!

SquareUp works spot on for myself on my own site as well as their Virtual Terminal for taking payments over the phone, only ever used that facility twice. I also like their Bluetooth terminal for in person card payments which I use a lot. It's small (68mm x 68mm x 13mm) & the battery lasts ages!

No monthly fees for either Stripe or SquareUp, just pay as you get paid!



Steve
Bolton Lancashire

Hi Steve,
That is very helpful, thanks.
Do you or your brother use Auth-only in your shopping cart and, if so, do you ever need to adjust the amount you capture against the authorisation?
Do you both find there is an easy way to get a breakdown of which transactions, precisely, make up each batch that gets paid into your bank on each day?

I guess this would be much less of a problem if there were only a few orders per day, or if the sales values were all pretty unique, but we've got days with lots of transactions and the same value can be repeated several times.

We are tearing our hair out wrt WorldPay on this issue, as well as all the other issues we've had. The Payment Gateway shows which transactions were sent to the Acquirer on each day, but the payment takes a variable amount of time to come through so the daily totals in the Gateway don't mach the amounts in the batch reports in the Acquirer, which in our case is also WorldPay! You would think that it would be very easy, as well as a fundamental requirement, that you can tell which customer's invoice was paid into our account on which day, but the daily totals don't line up. They seem to think you can search by transaction value, but our sales include a lot of repeated amounts so that is not unique. The settlement and Acquirer data doesn't show any customer names or cart order IDs, so we're flailing around trying to work out what's what!

WorldPay seems incredibly immature and their PayByLink is a joke if you actually want to find out if a customer has paid one!

SECPay was actually very good in most respects (although it didn't do PayByLink). It is extremely disappointing to go from them to WorldPay and find it is so useless, frankly!

I suspect we will want to try a demo or a trial before choosing anyone else as the WorldPay problem has cost us a lot of wasted time.

Thanks in advance for any more insight,

Steve.

Pragmasis Limited
https://SecurityForBikes.com

Hi Steve
We use Stripe for a couple of years now and it's been excellent.

quote:

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Do you both find there is an easy way to get a breakdown of which transactions, precisely, make up each batch that gets paid into your bank on each day?

---

I believe that you can have Stripe automatically pass payments to your account but we choose to transfer in lump sums.

Vince

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Hi, Reading this topic I am interested in switching from Sagepay / Worldpay to Stripe. I was interested to see the payment page where the customers enter their card details so I enabled Stripe temporarily on my website and the checkout opened a very small popup window for the payment details which I didn't think looked very professional. I noticed that the ECT company website uses Stripe so I tested the payment page there and it was a much more professional looking full screen layout. Can you confirm if it is possible to get the better looking payment page without custom coding?

Richard.

Hi Vince,
Thanks for that.
It is interesting that we were using SECPay as our Gateway and Streamline aka WorldPay as the Acquirer, and the bank payments were coming through to our bank as 'Streamline'. We didn't change the Acquirer but switched to WorldPay as the Gateway and then found the bank payments were labelled as 'WorldPay'. I was surprised that changed. We always used a SECPay batch report to see which payments were involved in each bank payment but the equivalent one from WorldPay's Gateway doesn't show a coherent time period for each batch, which undermines what that report is all about. It seems as though the batch lists the transactions that are passed to the Acquiring side in a specific day, but they don't all complete and go through to our bank account in the same time period, so it just goes out of synch. Aggregating them up into larger batches might smooth out these variable delays, but might also make it harder to trace which transactions have been delayed. Either way, it's a real struggle and probably the last straw for us with WorldPay.

Re Stripe, do you know if you can do Auth-only and then partial capture (e.g. £40 of £50 authorised)?

And with Stripe, are you likely to implement the Capture from the cart admin?

Thanks again for all input.

Pragmasis Limited
https://SecurityForBikes.com

Hi Vince/All,

Was there any update on the above, ref whether you can do a Capture within the Admin when using Stripe, and if they (and ideally the Admin) allow a partial Capture (e.g. if a discount is applied to an order so we only need to capture a smaller amount)?

Thanks in advance,

Steve.

Pragmasis Limited
https://SecurityForBikes.com

Hi Steve
No change I'm afraid but maybe it's a good idea to post this in the Suggestions forum. We do actually go through that when looking for ideas for updaters.

Vince

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