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Hosted Payment Forms => Currency + Tax info is missing

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nikolas

26 Sep, 2011 01:40 PM

Regarding tax:
When a tax is setup (in our case 15%) and a user is signed via the Hosted Payment Forms, neither tax or currency is displayed to the customer.

This is the message the customer gets:
Your first bill will occur immediately in the amount of 20.00. We will then charge your account monthly.

Which is false, since he will be billed 23.00

Regarding currency:
There is no currency information at all on the Hosted Payment Forms. This is very misleading to the customer since he is left uncertain how much he is actually charged (not knowing which currency it is, it could be anything actually).

In our case cheddar getter should operate entirely in EUR, meaning all pricing displays should be EUR and for charges via the HPF and API EUR should be used when amounts are specified, reporting in the CG Gui should be EUR based.
I have the feeling that this is not currently the case, even though all our gateways are set to use EUR (PayPal + CheddarGateway with EcorePay ). Only PayPal is currently active though.

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Marc Guyer on 26 Sep, 2011 10:54 PM

   

   Hi Nikolas -- Currency information is now displayed on the hosted pages. Tax info is another matter. It's a chicken and egg problem. Taxes are based on geography. It depends on the location of the merchant (which we know) and on the location of the customer (which we do not). In your case, your customers may be primarily from a certain country/state but not all.

   To solve for this, we have considered enabling you to customize the text that is displayed for each plan. In other words, you would be able to specify exactly what is shown in the hosted pages when a plan is selected. However, this isn't ideal for the vast majority of merchants. Most merchants don't know where their customer's live until they signup. Due to that fact, we need to develop a method for displaying tax information based on gathered geographic information.

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2. 2 Posted by nikolas on 27 Sep, 2011 09:53 AM

   

   Hi Marc,

   thx for the fast update regarding the currency.

   And you are correct when it comes to vat/taxes it get's very complicated very quickly.

   We are based in the EU and EU regulation currently says the following:

   • you need to charge Vat (merchant countries rate, in our case 15%) for customers within the EU
   • do not charge vat for customers from outside EU

   This would of course involve somehow finding out where the customer is located etc.
   However, since we cannot display a different price to our customers than we charge we are willing to do the following:

   • simply charge everybody 15% vat on signup, no matter where they are from. This is in compliance with EU regulation

   It should be possible to implement for you simply by adding a flag to the VAT settings that says:

   • charge all new customers VAT by default

   Do you think this or something similar could be done? The only other option we would have is to become PCI compliant and host our own payment pages, which we really don't want.

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3. 3 Posted by cheddargetter on 27 Sep, 2011 11:53 AM

   

   I have exactly the same problem.
   Currently we'll charge everyone VAT, and try to switch VAT off when we see that the new user is from the usa or a business outside of my european country.

   Though I feel it isn't hard at all to code and automate this process.
   I coded it myself on a different website of mine.

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4. 4 Posted by nikolas on 27 Sep, 2011 11:58 AM

   

   I realized that I was imprecise.

   In fact all customers are charged VAT by default, but the VAT info is not shown on the Hosted Payment Forms, which is the actual problem.

   The flag i suggested simply tells the Hosted Payment Forms to always display Tax info on signup (in our case Vat).

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5. 5 Posted by nikolas on 13 Oct, 2011 12:53 PM

   

   Since this is a crutial issue for us here is another solution we could live with:

   • a flag that shows Tax info on the hosted payment info, no matter what

   If we don't have any tax info we will run into problems with our customers since they are charged the tax but first find out about it on the payment receipt.

   Any chance that something like this can be implemented short term, meaning within 1-2 weeks?

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6. 6 Posted by Norbert on 15 Oct, 2011 02:37 PM

   

   I also would need EU VAT verification and display the tax on the hosted signup form.
   I also would need more details like street, city, zip-code - I even can't activate this. as we want to start ASAP - when do you think will these features be coded? Will you code it?

   thanks
   Norbert

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7. 7 Posted by nikolas on 15 Oct, 2011 03:25 PM

   

   What Norbert describes would be the optimal solution for the Hosted Payment Forms. However knowing that this will take some time to implement we need a fix that can be done quickly and will suit the needs of most merchants.

   So here is my proposal:

   • Right now if the tax field is set cheddar automatically charges new customers the tax that was setup.
     So why not always display the Tax on the create new customer page (when the Tax field is set)?
     The customer will be charged the Tax anyway, so why not display it? At this point it has nothing to do with where the customer is from since the Cheddar assumes that he is not exempt.
   • On the update customer page the Tax should be shown based on the TaxExempt flag
   • additionally: if you want to make sure you don't break any previous setups, introduce a flag in the settings that enables or disables showing the Tax on the HPF (if Tax is set and customer is not exempt)

   These suggestions should be fairly simple to implement and would enable merchants that have to pay Vat etc. to actually use your HPF.

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8. 8 Posted by nikolas on 04 Nov, 2011 03:40 PM

   

   Is there any news on this topic?

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9. Support Staff 9 Posted by Marc Guyer on 07 Nov, 2011 01:33 PM

   

   Hi guys -- At present, the hosted pages does not provide for display of currency or tax information. We plan to remedy that but we have no firm timeline to do so. In the meantime, I recommend using the API directly for your purposes. There are ways to use the hosted pages for input of payment method only. This is a slightly more advanced use of hosted pages.

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10. 10 Posted by nikolas on 15 Nov, 2011 05:29 PM

    

    Ok, I get it it creates some work to make any of this happen, but using the API directly is not an option for us at the moment since its heavily complicating the entire signup /updating flow and also leads to some scenarios that we would like to prevent from running into.

    So, would it be possible to just have a plain textfield somewhere prominent where we could state that people will be charge TAX ? As static text?

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11. 11 Posted by nikolas on 16 Nov, 2011 05:01 PM

    

    Ok, found a workaround. I just put a static text in the About the Company field, that can be found on the Hosted Payment settings:

    Configuration => Hostend Pages => Company Info => About the Company

    Kind of ugly, but works for now.

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12. Marc Guyer closed this discussion on 22 Nov, 2011 08:57 PM.