Knowledgebase
Home » Item #921
Do you support the HSBC payment gateway?
Question
I wish to use the HSBC payment gateway for my site. Do you have any support for this?
Answer
We did an HSBC integration for a CactuShop v5.0 in 2004. With some modification it should be possible to run this on v5.1. Because the gateway system is completely different in v6, it is probably not practical to modify the scripts for that.
However, if you're looking for HSBC support because an HSBC sales rep offered you a price you couldn't refuse on the deal, then you need to look at the system a little more closely.
The HSBC system is very poorly designed in our opinion. It requires SSL on the domain itself (few hundred pounds) and also requires a COM object installed on the server (i.e. you need a dedicated server or very friendly web host). But despite these drawbacks, it still doesn't allow you to run the payment form on your site itself - users are still redirected to HSBC's secure form to make payment. So you don't get the benefits of being able to fit the form seamlessly into your site as you can with AuthorizeNet AIM and Verisign PP, but you get the drawbacks of the cost of a dedicated server and your own secure certificate. The price calculation is starting to look not quite as good as it did initially.
Furthermore, the documentation is very poor. For example, ASP requires the COM object, but there is no mention of this in the PDF guide at all, though it *is* in the CD if you search the folders hard enough and know it's there. Error messages are equally poor, such as "incorrect input" without telling you which part of the input is the problem.
In our opinion, HSBC's system is designed for medium sized companies upwards, though the sales guys don't seem to realize that, or certainly don't mention it. We would also expect that once a significant enough number of people have been hooked in, HSBC will increase charges roughly in line with everyone else. Basically, they got into the market at least 5 years too late, designed a rather poor solution and predatory pricing is the only way to overcome this.
The saddest part is that they actually sent someone to talk to us (and presumably some other developers) prior to launching their offering, though we suspect the technology decisions were already made by that point.
If you really want to use HSBC, we can certainly supply the code "as is" without support. We decided not to include it in the release version of CactuShop as the lack of good documentation and error messages would make support of it uneconomic.
In summary, assess the hidden costs of the HSBC system and the likelihood of them maintaining low prices for an extended period before you decide to select it for your online store. We can integrate your store with this gateway, but this would be charged as a custom job (typically 7-14 hours to implement, configure, debug, test, etc)
Note: due to the differences between v5 and previous versions, the v5.0 scripts would need a very large amount of modification to work with prior versions of CactuShop. It may be simpler to approach it as you would any new integration, using existing v4 scripts as a start point.