Invoice Me Option

[FHadminStL5000]

My client insists that she was informed by an Adobe Buiness Catalyst sales person early on that the the Business Catalyst product supported online payment with an inoice me later option. The Business Catalyst support information seems to indicate that this type of setup is NOT possible – that an invoice me later option would be for offline payments only. Authorize.net is her selected payment gateway and they say that the inoice me option is NOT supported on their end. So who is right? Can I set up her Business Catalyst cart to support online processing through Authorize.net and then add an invoice me later option that would effectively prevent immediate processing? Or instead, would this be better accomplished via offline processing where I add an invoice me later checkbox as a custom field to her shopping cart which was then acted on accordingly during offline processing?

My client insists the former is an option and wants the convenience of online processing with the invoice me later bypass option. I'm telling her that the support information seems to indicate she can't have both. Any help in defining available options is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ken

[smitchell80 · Accepted solution]

Hi Ken,

Apologies for the confusion.

Not sure if the rep and the client were confusing the "bill later option" with payment for the "overall site account billing" which there is an option only for this. 

However it sounds more like the client wants this option for the shop within the site which is not a feature that we have.  The workaround is exactly what you've mention which is to set "offline" orders and to process on your own terms. 

So basically switch the assigned gateway from Authorize to offline and handle the orders manually.

Hope this helps clarifies.

-Sidney

[FHadminStL5000]

Sidney:

Thanks for answering. You were correct in your assumption – The client wanted the invoice option for within the Adibe Business Catalyst hosted shopping cart. With absolutely no intent to insult, can I take your response as a definitive answer, or should I wait for others to confirm or deny?

Thanks,

Ken

[smitchell80]

Hi Ken,

This is a definitive response from a BC feature standpoint. 

Cheers!

-Sidney

[FHadminStL5000]

Sidney:

Understood. If it's okay with you, I'd like to ask the same question in another way to see if I missed anything. If we are using a payment gateway to process payments online, can any of the offline payment options (like the free option) be manually added to the shopping cart (while still remaining under the payment gateway model) and then be repurposed to achieve the same end goal? For instance, can we add the free payment option (under the payment gateway model) to a drop menu containg both the credit card and free options, and then if the free option was selected have the payment processor treat it as a no-charge bypass thus achieving the same end goal. I recognize this is a lot of ifs, but I'm under pressure to make sure there are no other options to achieve the client's preferred goal.

Thanks,

Ken

[smitchell80]

Ken,

The free option will trigger an offline order for orders equating to $0.  Anything greater than $0 will need to have "credit card" selected to have the order process by the assigned gateway. 

So to recap you can have both free + credit card option but free orders will trigger an offline order which will not go through the assigned gateway as there's no payment to collect.

Hope this clarifies.

-Sidney

[FHadminStL5000]

Sidney:

So theoretically, if say our selected products in the cart totalled $200, and the free option was made available to the end user, and the end user selected the free option and then checked out, then an order for $0 would be executed as an offline payment, saved into the system and the payment gateway would effectively be bypassed. But if the end user didn't select the free option and selected the credit card option, then the order would be processed online for $200 and saved into the system. If so, provided the free option can exist as a user defined choice along side online credit card processing, this sure sounds like what we're after from a workflow perspective. In which case, all we would need to do is to make the free option available and then inform the user to select it in order to be invoiced for the order.

Does this sound accurate to you?

Also, under the above scenario, would the offline order still accurately reflect the pricing of the items in the cart? So in this example, it would still show $200 as the total of the products and $0 as the amount charged?

And thanks again in advance for sticking through this issue with me.

Ken

[smitchell80]

I see where you are going with this but will not work in this fashion. 

Basically the free option will only work if the cart's amount equals to $0.  If there's a balance of any kind the customer cannot use the "free option" as the system will prompt an error that this cannot be used to checkout and they will need to apply payment which is to select the "credit card" option. 

So this will only work if you had products priced at $0. To answer your last query the pricing will report based on the pricing set so it will report the pricing but if you were hoping to somehow have the system recognize that the $0 is actually a $200 valued item the answer is not possible I'm afraid.

Kind regards,

-Sidney