Glossary Item Box
PayFast is a South African based payment system. It provides an alternative way to allow your customers to pay using credit cards and other forms of payment without you having to incur the expenses of a merchant account. PayFast performs the transaction on their website, and adds the money to your PayFast account. For more information about PayFast, see their official site at https://www.payfast.co.za.
Before you can accept payments via PayFast, you will need to sign up for a business account on their website.
Requirements
Supported Features
Auto Return returns the customer to your website after they submit payment at PayFast. Squirrelcart automatically makes use of this feature, you do not have to enable it.
Payment Data Transfer (PDT)
When PayFast returns the customer to your website after they submit payment, they do not provide any data to indicate the status of that payment. PDT is used to make a behind the scenes query to PayFast to obtain information about the transaction. This allows us to determine if the transaction was approved or not. PDT requires CURL and OpenSSL.
PDT is used when the customer is returned to your website. If the transaction was successful, the order is completed in Squirrelcart.
Instant Transaction Notification (ITN)
The combination of AutoReturn and PDT is enough for most orders to complete in Squirrelcart. However, AutoReturn relies on the customer's browser. Should the customer close their browser window before returning, AutoReturn and PDT won't be able to complete the order. In these instances, ITN is used to complete the order via a silent post.
ITN provides immediate notification of PayFast payments you receive. ITN requires CURL and OpenSSL.
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While PDT and ITN are not required by PayFast, Squirrelcart's integration does require them. You must enable both PDT and ITN for PayFast to function properly. Instructions for both are included below. |
http://www.EXAMPLE.COM/squirrelcart/payfast_itn.php
Change the domain name to match your site. If you have installed Squirrelcart in a subdirectory, be sure to add that to the URL. For example, if your storefront page is http://www.example.com/store/store.php, then your ITN URL would be http://www.example.com/store/squirrelcart/payfast_itn.php.The best way to test is with Payment Mode set to Live. Create a product that has a low price, and place an order for it.
PayFast offers a sandbox environment for testing. If you wish to test with that environment, set the Payment Mode field to Test and change all your credentials in Squirrelcart to match the ones they provide for their sandbox environment:
https://www.payfast.co.za/s/std/integration-guide
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