VirtualMerchant Plugin Setup documentation

Hello,

I am finding a real lack of documentation in regards to properly setting up the VirtualMerchant payment plugin. I specifically have questions about the "Sandbox" option?

I really need to test the site and the entire checkout process and would like to use the sandbox option for testing reasons but I find it hard to believe that just enabling this option will do anything or maybe it does but due to the lack of documentation on it I have no way of knowing?

Perhaps there is documentation and I can not find it but if someone could explain to me or point me to where I can find the proper information on how t set up the sandbox option for the virtualmerchant payment gateway I would really appreciate it.

Hi Nicolas,

Thank you for the explanation!!! I guess saying "It is hard to believe" was the wrong term to use, I just assumed there was more to it than the flick of a switch because I am so used to how you have to set up a sandbox account for testing with Paypal and because I could not locate the proper documentation on VirtualMerchant other than in their developer documentation that says you have to have them set up a test account for you and so I thought maybe that was related to this situation?

I am setting up a Hikashop for a client and it is my first time working with Hikashop so I have a bit of a learning curve to deal with and my client uses VirtualMerchant and it is a payment gateway I have not worked with before as well. So I was hoping there would be tooltips or at least a little bit of a walk through tutorial in your documentation on configuring the plugin properly.

All in all so far I have to say I am very very happy to be working with Hikashop!

Thank you very much for your time!

Hello,

I have to bring this post back to life becuase I am still having issues with VirtualMerchant in Sandbox mode.

Basically what I am finding is that the credentials given to me (Merchant ID, User ID and Pin) do not work when I have the sandbox mode enabled. I get the following error with the debug on.

( [errorCode] => 4012 [errorName] => VID/UID Invalid [errorMessage] => The VirtualMerchant ID and/or User ID supplied in the authorization request is invalid. )

Yet, when I disable the sandbox mode, everything works fine and I can perform a transaction. But it is a production transaction not a test transaction and the credit card used for testing is actually getting charged?

The client has contacted VirtualMerchant several times and they keep saying to use the credentials I have been given?

So what is the deal here? Since there is a lack of documentation on your part due to not having the time to create them I am still kind of in the dark as to what the sandbox mode should do and why it is not working?

In the VirtualMerchant Developer guide on page 12 it says you must contact VirtualMerchant and request a test account? But you never mentioned that and my client asked them about this and they said we just need to make sure that ssl_test_mode=True with the credentials they gave us. Debug mode reveals it is set to "True" obviously becuase I have the sandbox mode enabled ( <ssl_test_mode>True</ssl_test_mode> ).

So are they just being mis-informed and really do need a test account set up and that the credentials they keep giving us are for a production account?

This is very confusing and all I want to/need to do is perform test transactions but there seems to be something I am missing here?

I really could use your help on this, thank you for your time!

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for your input on this. The whole VM payment plugin was a confusing and frustrating situation for me do to the lack of documentation and conflicts in VM's documentation which I will explain below, but I finally got it figured out.

I thought I would post my situation incase others in the future ever find themselves in this situation with the VirtualMerchant Payment Plugin.

It turns out as you mentioned Nicolas, when you choose the "Sandbox" mode on in the payment plugin that makes the plugin send data to demo.virtualmerchant.com, which is correct in that VM needs to set up a test account, and when you disable "Sandbox" in the payment plugin it uses just virtualmercant.com to send data to a production account.

BUT, where things got screwed up and conflicted is that I actually contacted VM personally, and even though there own documentation states to contact them to set up a test account. When I called them they kept insisting that a test account is not necessary? I had to call three times until I did got a rep who was intelligent enough to convert the production account I was working with on their end to a test account. So the rep converted the production account that was given to me to use so it was in "TEST MODE" as they put it.

Sooooo you would think that at that point the issue has been settled and I could go on my merry way with testing transactions. So as one would think and if someone is following all the documentation. You would think that now that VM set up the account to be in "TEST MODE" that you would set the VM payment plugin to have "Sandbox" enabled. But that is not the case. ss I mentioned above when sandbox is enabled it changes the url that data is sent to. But it turns out after a couple hours of frustration , I discovered that after VM changed the account to run in TEST MODE, that you must have "Sandbox" DISABLED in the payment plugin so that it still sends data to the production url.

long story short, the "Sandbox" option in the payment plugin proved useless and actually made things more confusing in my situation. And in the end what you must do if you want to test transactions using the VM payment plugin is to leave "Sandbox" DISABLED and contact VirtualMerchant. Ask them to set up the account in "TEST MODE" and perform all you test transactions. Then you must call VM back when you are done testing and have them convert the account back into a "PRODUCTION" account.