In the world of development and integration, you invariably come across projects that require some form of integration with or connection to an e-commerce solution. You may need to sell product on your site, or you may need to process batches of credit cards and checks for services. In any event, the first step is to find a reliable and reputable third-party vendor. There’s lots of them out there: Sage, USAPay, PaySimple, First Data, TeleCheck. All have names that make it sound like they know what they’re doing.

After some reading and phone interviewing, we (my client and I) decide on First Data. They have a stable platform, lots of sample code in different languages to get your connectivity started, and they just are beginning a joint service with TeleCheck to offer batch check processing (ACH).

We laid out our requirements to First Data in several meetings and conference calls: our in-house system manages tuition and billing charges, monthly it sends this batch to the vendor to process all the charges against parents’ cards and accounts, and then we receive back into our system the status of all charges for reconciliation (Approved, Denied, Declined, etc.). It seemed like the perfect solution; all automated and tight.

This was the service and functionality that was sold to us. Shortly after the implementation phase began, however, we discovered that they have no such capability for returning to our system the status of the processed charges. You can imagine our reaction. (This was the differentiator between them and their competition. Sage, for example, is very clear that they cannot support this.) We’d already put in place all the hooks for passing our data to them, so we were in deep at this point. A week of calls and emails followed with the result only that our sales person was new and didn’t understand what we planned on doing, even after all the meetings and descriptions and specs. The short of it is that they lack the capacity to fulfill the promise and have no intention of satisfying our expectations.

For the short-term I wrote a script that takes a downloaded report and pipes it into our system so that we can have monthly reconciliation tracked. It works, but it is not automated and not ideal. Strike one.

The second incident comes from the sample code they make available to customers to connect to their system. While the code is sound in that it does indeed provide hooks for connecting, it is flawed in structure so as to let test transactions through as real transactions. How did we find this out? By sending thousands of dollars worth of tests through only to find they actually got processed. A true nightmare. Fortunately, we were able to clear out the check transactions quickly because they take several days to process, but the credit cards went through instantly. Fun. Days spent on the phone with banks reversing charges and calling parents to clear the situation. Strike two.

The third incident stems from the fact that for all check transactions Telecheck requires a valid driver’s license for the account holder. We have been billing our parents for several years (there is an established relationship), so Telecheck was able to waive this requirement for us. Until this weekend, that is. Some technical error at Telecheck caused the system to be unavailable for several hours. When service was restored, our transactions began to fail because no driver license information was sent along with our records. Again, after several calls and emails, it appears the service department is unaware of our waived requirement and now needs to take it “under review.” This “review” has been going on for four days now, and meanwhile our transactions continue to fail.

So I ask you, is this the support you expect from your vendors? Once the promises are made and the contracts signed, they wash their hands of you? If I could, I’d pull up stakes and move on in a minute, but it ain’t that easy. I’m restraining myself and trying hard to attract the bees with honey rather than my piss and vinegar, but it’s tough. This affects my relationship with my client (though he’s been very good to me about it). I put this service right up there with overstock.com and Sprint.

The take-away? I did everything in my power to mitigate the circumstances that affected my client’s system and his ability to run his business.  This is his expectation of me. I’m confounded that First Data does not share this philosophy.

Update 4/24/2008, 9:00AM: We’re on Day 7 now.  We get nothing from First Data but emails asking us to test again (although surely they must know it still does not work), and excuses and promises. We are 7 days down and they have done nothing. You decide.

Update 4/24/2008, 2:00PM: Their brilliant engineered solution is for us to put a dummy driver’s license number and state in the required fields. It works for now, but I imagine it will break when someone changes or removes it.

Update 4/24/2008, 5:45PM: First Data decides the dummy data hack isn’t such a good idea afterall. Now they want to port us over to another “product.” Not really sure what that means yet.

written by Christopher Murray