Save Customer Data/Shop Manager Payment Gateway Access
Ideally all orders would be created by the registered customer using the website interface. This simply does not happen. Many of the orders that come in are from past clients over the phone. Their expectation is that the company should have their personal information available to create new orders after a first order has taken place, making new phone orders simple and quick.
Currently, woocommerce has only one option for Shop Managers in this situation and it is hardly a viable option...
The Shop Manager must use the website interface to create the order, create a user account on behalf of the customer, and enter CC info while talking to the customer over the phone. From this point, customer data can be brought up from the Dashboard Order screen when creating an order, but the Shop Manager can only submit an email invoice instead of entering the CC info and processing. This forces the Shop Manager to use the website interface each time and login as the customer. This is a extremely time consuming process.
My idea is to allow for customer information to be entered and saved, including CC information, and be processed from the Add Order screen. In addition, the Shop Manager should be able to create the order, autofill the new order form, and process the CC info from the same Add Order screen.
Unlike recurring billing, these orders may be intermittent and not take place on a consistent schedule.
Chris Risse
shared this idea
5 comments
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Alistair Wallace
commented
I have to agree with many of the comments below. I too do not wish to save the CC in wordpress or anywhere on my site, but with the payment gateway.
Another option is to integrate with the "Account Funds" extension. Giving the shop manager the ability from a simple order form to create an order based on products and process the order based on funds in the account.
The same ability should be there to allow the shop manager to place an order and process it all the way through for the customer on the phone, without having access to the CC information. Last 4 digits of card for confirmation would be fine
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Martin fisher
commented
To be honest this is becoming more and more essential. Its also largely lacking elsewhere but needs urgent attention. I too am unhappy about anything that risks user CC data being available but How difficult would this be to execute really?
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Patrick Garman
commented
Point taken. PS: Braintree does the same thing ;)
Realistically this would not be too difficult, the checkout forms are pre-built, the CC entry forms are pre-built. Just needs reformatted some to be in a shop managers section to create manual orders. That way it is made for all gateways too, if a store only takes paypal obviously this would be a bit hard but a created order could then be paid by a customer on the website. If the gateway requires a CC to be entered and no saving then the customer can give the number over the phone or go online and pay. Saved CC's would auto show up in the premade form.
I'll add this to my list of extension ideas, got a few too many floating around at the moment so no real ETA I can give you as these are things I build on the side.
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Chris Risse
commented
@patrick I understand you are working on the recurring billing feature for the Samurai plugin, which uses a token system for retrieving the customer CC info from the secure Fee Fighters server. This would be the ideal situation for this idea to be implemented effectively. I do not want CC info stored in the website database either. A complete gateway system for Woocommerce should include a customer interface and a shop manager interface for creating/completing a transaction.
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Patrick Garman
commented
This would be a nice option but the one place I disagree with is the CC info. I in no way shape or form like having CC info in the WordPress DB. The second you do this you risk your customers data. It isn't that hard to add the functionality into gateways that support it (like I have) but it seems that not many extension developers are doing that.
At the same time though I would not feel comfortable calling a company and them offering "would you like me to bill that to the same credit card?" because I don't know how they save my data, and most customers in my experience don't expect you to save their CC.
