Thread: Plain ol' cash

Plain ol' cash

Hi,

Since not everyone has access to a paypal account I would like to know if anyone has implemented a 'pay cash or bank transfer' gateway? Seems simple enough. User selects bank transfer/cash in dropdown, next page shows bank details or how to pay in cash, ad ID and a continue button, ad gets posted but not published.
Then administrator can check if money was paid (by letting users specify ad ID in bank transfer) and then simply change status to published.

Anyone?

Gr

This is something we'd be interested in building into ClassiPress. The only problem is, we're not familiar with how the process would work. Bank transfers in the US for purchasing goods or services online are very rare. We tend to use credit cards (which explains why Americans get into debt so easily. lol) or PayPal for these things.

So can you go into more detail on how this would work? It sounds pretty easy to do but it would have to be a manual process to check if the funds got transfered and then manually approve the ad. Is it common for business owners to list their bank account number & other sensitive information on the ClassiPress checkout page?

~David

Hi David,

First of all sorry for causing a stir with my other post. I do not mean harm but was just curious and do not wan't to get in trouble 6 months down the road.

Normally what we would do is tell someone to either give cash or do a bank transfer, we could then manually approve their ad. I do that now by telling people "Go through the whole submittal process and then once you see the paypal page just click go back to merchant without completing the payment process." Now the ad will still show up in the Posts as pending. Then I manually publish it.

For a bank transfer it could be similar with one addition (which would be good for cash to) we need a reference ID. The procedure would be.
- Make ad
- review and submit
- Then a page should tell people to transfer money to a bank account (and details would be shown) + it will tell them to mention the reference ID in the comments/description section (which is available with most bank transfer systems)
- I check my bank account. See that a payment was made for an ad. Lookup the reference number and manually publish the ad.

The only issue I would see is to have the manually approved ads amounts added to the db so the totals are correct.

Hope this is clear.

Thanks,

Marco

By the way, I have started work on it and am like 90% done. I switched it on, you can see it at my site: www.bonbizzle.com Instead of paypal choose cash. Let me know when you saw it so I can switch it back off since it is not working 100% yet.

Thanks. That definitely helps me better understand the process and wouldn't be too difficult to implement. Each ad submitted gets a unique transaction ID so we could use that.

What would the exact fields be for bank transfers to work? Account number? Bank Name? Routing #? Anything else?

So providing a bank account # publicly wouldn't be a security risk? Personally, I wouldn't want my bank account # exposed but for other countries, it might be totally acceptable. Speaking of, which country do you live in?

Also, can you explain how your customer would then transfer the money into your account? Would they do it online using their bank or in person?

Hi,

I would need to investigate the fields required. You need them for the admin section I presume? Unfortunately there is not a 'standard' way. In europe they use IBAN numbers and I believe they will change the bank account numbers to an international format soon. (maybe a text area so people can put in their own specific details rather than specific fields should do the trick)

Although I was born in Holland and just have worked in Dubai for 4 years I now live on a small tropical Caribbean island called Bonaire. 15000 people here and a good example of a place where credit cards are not used at all.

With regards to disclosing your bank account number, I know for sure that many big companies in Europe still allow you to do bank transfer and therefore they have to publish their bank account details. No issue so far. It's just to send money and just a bank account number is quite useless. For instance this is from the website of Vodafone in Holland. They mention you can do a transfer to pay your bill and mention the account number.

Even in Dubai, where the banking system is awful, you can do online transfers. Login to your account, fill out a form with the details of the recipient (bank account number etc) and press send. Very easy. So that would be the procedure yes.

Gr

Great insight. Thanks for sharing. Yes, we would need the fields for the admin option page.

I think your suggestion of a text area field is the best option since all countries are different. I will get this on our product road map and hopefully implemented soon.

Brilliant! Thanks, look forward to it.

This is great news as most of my website users would rather pay by bank transfers.

This feature is now live so you can download it in v3.0.4.