Experimentation into live support…

Overview

This simple guide is to assist users of our issue tracking system. It explains how to raise issues/requests with our tram and how we handle them. The tracker is accessible from our extranet which is linked from our home page via the "login" button on the web-engineer homepage. A direct link is also available; this will have been emailed to you at the point of account creation along with your username and password.

Once logged in you will see a menu bar with the following options –

• My tickets, clicking this will return you to the page you are shown when you log in, which gives a broad overview of the current issues and requests that belong to you.
• Search, to locate tickets.
• New ticket – this is where you can raise new jobs and or issues with our team.

The remaining options give more advanced options to interigate, report and configure the system – these we will skip over for now as they are not needed for the day to day use.

The initially shown requests are broken down into three panes –

• My requests – these are tickets you have raised.
• My tickets – these are tickets we have raised on your behalf.
• My Queries – we may pre-configure your account to have a number of useful "lookups" to get a quick access to different views on your tickets. If any are available they will be listed here.

Tickets explained

There are normally three classes of ticket we track, these are "bugs" and "jobs" and "wish-list". We distinguish between these so that we can separately deal with issues ongoing with existing software form requests for new developments or features. The wish-list is there to help field ideas about what could be done, and enables discussion on ideas without actually identifying them as a definitive requirement for development. If you are reporting a bug please see this page for an explanation of how to log bugs effectively.

Creating a ticket

Before you create a ticket you should have a quick look at the tickets already open – you should use the search function to make sure your issue isn't already being dealt with.

To create a ticket simply hit the new ticket icon. This will bring up a form to enter the ticket details. The first step is to choose the type of bug your submitting. Once this has been chosen you will then be asked to supply further information. Normally when creating a ticket please leave the state to "unconfirmed" as we will need to confirm the issue with you as the first step for processing the ticket. You can tell us how urgent the ticket is to you by selecting a priority. The summary should be brief but a clear reflection of the ticket. Finally filling in the description and being as detailed as possible will help us to understand your request. You can also upload an attachment using this form such as a supporting screen-shot or other supporting document, to send up multiple documents please zip these first and attach.

Due to the number of features available, we would normally recommend PayPal Express Checkout or Google Checkout.

There are different levels of integration you can carry out on a website, while there are many variations, broadly speaking your looking at three basic setups:

1. Blind integration – your website has some simple forms and NO database backend. In this situation, you just use your payment gateway to take a payment and manage who has paid for what. This is a simple to understand option and means that the shop operator can manage there orders entirely with the gateway provider, only needing to update the website when their prices change.
2. Callback integration – your website has a database and manages order data. The payment gateway makes a callback (hence the name!) into your system to keep the order status up to date. This option is more complex but is useful if the shop operator needs the ability to manage the order data on the website. Why would you want to do this? Hosting order data in your website enables you to provide a more services to your customer such as order status, history and enables you to perform statistical analysis for other business functions such as accounting or marketing.
3. Full integration – your website takes credit card details and performs the payment with the gateway directly. Your server must be PCI compliant and undergo regular security audits. This option requires a lot more work as it means the whole card verification procedure must be handled on the web server.

PayPal offer all three options whereas Google Checkout only offer the first two.

Both gateway systems are good however Google checkout will – being Google give you better quality marketing data with its tie ins to Google Analytics and also, you can advertise you’re a Google Checkout seller on any PPC advertising you do using their AdWords programme. Google have offered £10 of checkout fee suspension against every £1 spent on Adwords but this promotion ended at the end of 2008.

PayPal I believe will give you better financial tie ins as they are more money oriented – I may substantiate this further at a later date.

I would suggest for business start-ups or newcomers to payment gateways that; due to the quality of marketing data available – Google Checkout may be a better option; you could always switch to PayPal or offer it as an alternative at a later date.

These payment gateways at the time of writing have the following charges:

Google Checkout AND PayPal

There are to no charges made by these gateway providers to transfer money into your own accounts. There are transfer limits however; these limits can be modified and the frequency of transfers can be managed. Transfer limits are as far as I can tell an anti-fraud “feature”.