Warren Seen

Client: 8bits Media
Date completed: January 2007
Platform: PHP5, LAMP stack
License: Commercial; works done for hire
Source: Proprietary
Technologies: NSIPS and eWay payment gateways, Excel spreadsheet generation.

The Solution:
The Australian Equine Alliance (AEA), a client of 8bits Media, required the ability to collect membership applications or renewals and associated payments from users (via 3rd party payment gateways), manage their user database, create reports and export them in Microsoft Excel format.

The consumer facing component provided for user login, separate signup and renewal “wizards” - consisting of multiple step data collection and validation in a stateful manner, payment processing through a 3rd party gateway including audit trail generation, and email receipt generation to the user on payment success.

The AEA had a somewhat complex price scale, with 3 membership levels, senior and youth memberships and different pricing according to the time of year, giving over 30 different combinations which had to be determined at the time of sale. Following year memberships were also allowed from a specified date before the end of the current calendar year, which provided yet another variable in determining the appropriate price.

For administrators, a control panel was developed which permitted full control and modification of user entries, manual entry of users paying by other means (e.g. cheque, direct deposit), HTML format multi-page reports with downloadable Excel versions, and an audit trail viewer to aid in payment reconciliation with the credit card gateway.

Whilst happy with the functionality of the system, the AEA was unhappy with the performance of their payment gateway provider. In conjunction with 8bits, I undertook research into alternatives and recommended eWay, which proved to be almost a drop-in replacement with only minor modifications required.

Before this project, I had not done any payment gateway work for quite some time, so this was a perfect opportunity to catch up with the state of the art as well as get some experience with a local Australian gateway provider.