aslam

Can anyone recommend a decent merchant gateway available to companies Canada, that works 100% with WHMCS and WHMCS's native recurring billing? Here are the key features I need: 100% supported on WHMCS (preferably with one of the built in modules so I don't have to pay extra for support from a 3rd party) Works directly on the WHMCS site/domain without redirecting to a third party site Tokenization: Will do card storage with the gateway so that my WHMCS installation is taken out of PCI scope and I stop paying the PCI non-compliance penalty Automatically converts cards that are currently stored locally into being stored remotely to take me out of PCI scope Competitive Merchant Rates (monthly around $20-30 per month & card processing rates that are competitive with my current rates which are 2.3% + $0.12 per transaction) No monthly minimum transaction amount No expensive application fees Free Daily deposits with no reserves 3DSecure & AVS Support (optional) Fees are recorded in WHMCS Any suggestions from folks out there? Remember this has to work in Canada for a Canadian business. Thanks!

Hello… I have started to get the following error on my Optimal Payments gateway. Anyone have a resolution for it? Thanks! ------------------------------------------------- Invoice ID => 636 User ID => 23 Amount => 52.50 <ccTxnResponseV1 xmlns="http://www.optimalpayments.com/creditcard/xmlschema/v1"> <confirmationNumber>2475970240</confirmationNumber> <decision>ERROR</decision> <code>5040</code> <actionCode>D</actionCode> <description>Your merchant account is not configured for the transaction you attempted. Please contact Technical Support for more information.</description> <detail> <tag>InternalResponseCode</tag> <value>58</value> </detail> <detail> <tag>SubErrorCode</tag> <value>0</value> </detail> <detail> <tag>InternalResponseDescription</tag> <value>Your merchant account is not configured for the transaction type requested</value> </detail> <txnTime>2014-05-07T11:52:45.421-04:00</txnTime> <duplicateFound>false</duplicateFound> </ccTxnResponseV1>

Hello all fellow Canadian WHMCS suppliers, I have noticed some scattered discussion in various other threads and confusion about the GST/HST rules for businesses based in Canada selling ISP and web hosting services to customers in Canada. There were a couple of suggestions to create a thread dedicated to this topic. Today I spent a few of hours on the phone and on the CRA website getting a clear answer on this topic and so here are my findings for the benefit of all: First off, when reading these documents and talking to them you'll see/hear the word "supplies" a lot and I had some initial confusion as to what qualifies as supplies when you're delivering a service like web or application hosting. Well when I spoke to them today, I got a clear ruling that according to the CRA definition, the word "supplies" refers to tangible goods, intangible goods, as well as services. Now the next question is, what type of good are we providing. Well, according to document b-090, Sec III, Example 9, web-hosting is considered a service. Now that we know that we need to figure out where the service is deemed to be "made" in order to figure out whose tax rate to charge. According to document b-103, Sec 5, XI, Example 105 the hosting service "supply" is considered to be "made" in the province of the customer's address. And according to that same document in Sec 1, 1st paragraph, 1st line, we are required to charge tax based on the rate in the province that the supply is deemed to be "made". So I asked them for a formal ruling as to what this means to me as an offsite backup hosting provider in BC and their response was that according to the current rules and as of July 1, 2010, I am required to charge 12% HST to consumers in BC; 13% to consumers in ON, NB and Nfld; 15% to consumers in NS; and 5% to consumers in all other provinces and territories. I hope that helps and avoids others from having to go through what I did today. Here are links to the documents I referenced above: b-090 b-103 Also, if you want a clear ruling on the tax issue based on your specific circumstances, you can call CRA's GST/HST Ruling Line at 1-800-959-8287 like I did, but be prepared to get your hands dirty and to accept the way that they define words like "supply" and "made" because it is different than conventional thinking. Aslam

jaatendi, Can you share what you discovered? I only need to register 1 or 2 domains a year since my primary business is offsite backup but I am looking at getting a reseller account for the odd occasion when I do have a customer that wants to run their domain through me. And they are mostly .ca domains as well. Did you compare prices? Who was best? Thanks, Aslam

I see WHMCS's real strength as the fact that it is one of the only billing systems that focuses on (and does a very good job of) regularly repeating/subscription billing. And my suggestion would be that WHMCS focus on that and enhancing those functions while being somewhat agnostic as to what services we are billing for. Personally I don't use any of the web server control features of WHMCS. I use it exclusively to bill for my online backup subscription service. The provisioning of user orders/services is done via a server module/plug-in that connects to my backup server and then creates, suspends and terminates the accounts as directed by the status of the customer billing. Unfortunately since the system is so focused on web hosting services, it is sometimes problematic. For example, constantly having to navigate around options for web hosting, domain name sales to make sure that my customers don't see such options is rather annoying. As well, the constant assumption that we are selling Web Hosting which pervades the system means that the server module for my backup services cannot do everything it needs. For example, upgrades and downgrades and optional add-ons (like MySQL Server or Exchange Server backup capabilities) are often buggy and require manual intervention to enable. And some features are just not available (like adding 10GB of storage quota for free when they buy the MySQL Server backup option). I wish that the core WHMCS system would be a bit more agnostic as to what service we are selling and focus more on the billing, management of affiliates, expenses, transaction fees, etc. and leave all provisioning of those services to the server module plug-ins. At the same time, it would be good if WHMCS gave more flexibility to the server modules to provision in different ways (for example to package storage quota increases with options). Having said that about the Subscription Billing aspects/future of WHMCS, I can see the points that RPS is making and I agree that if WHMCS wants to focus on the subscription billing, then it would make sense for WHMCS to integrate with some other shopping cart solution (like e-junkie). In the scenario that I imagine, the other shopping cart (e-junkie for example) would allow the other solution to take care of core shopping cart functions and selling of one-off/inventory-style items like computer hardware, boxed software, shoes, widgets, sprockets, sprachets and any other such product that is a one transaction sale and then hand off any subscription billing to WHMCS. Just my 2 cents. Aslam

Is there any progress with getting an ER diagram for the WHMCS DB? I tried running the schemaSpy tool noted, but it refused to launch on my OS X machine. However I was able to get MySQL Workbench 5.1 to run. It successfully connected to my WHMCS 4.0.2 DB and, using the reverse engineer function, it created an ER Diagram with all of the WHMCS tables on it, however none of the relationships between tables were represented. Anyone else have any ideas? We want to do some custom reporting and we need a sense of the DB schema and relationships to do this. Thanks, Aslam

agreed... it is causing concern for my resellers also. Showing the discount earlier in the checkout process would alleviate that. Thanks, Aslam

What does this one do? I can't seem to find an answer either on these forums or in the Wiki documentation How does this new option differ from the old one of "Apply to new signups only"? It would seem that they both do the same thing so I think I must be missing something here. Thanks, A

Thank you joshabts! This setup works for me as well. Only point I would add to those instructions is make sure the firewall on your server/web host provider allows SMTP connections outbound on port 587 to smtp.gmail.com. Initially my provider (Site5) did not allow for this and I had to get them to add these settings to their firewall whitelist. Tip: smtp.gmail.com is actually a CNAME for gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com which itself resolves to numerous A records. Make sure you whitelist all of them.