I don’t like posting too often and will only write about three things, a good products/service, advice that may be helpful and bad products/service. As you may have guessed from the title this is the latter and a bit of a rant.
A client needed a multi-currency merchant account and they banked with Barclays. I have worked with several providers before such as SagePay, Cardnet, WorldPay, HSBC and PayPal but as Barclays had only just added multi-currency this would be a first. The initial meeting was great with the Barclays people explaining that they are one of the most innovative online banks with offering such as pingit so we were sold.
Time went on and it was taking weeks to get the merchant account and ePDQ set up. The site needed to launch with multi-currency so we had to go with PayPal for all transactions initially as this is quick and easy to setup. Whilst waiting I thought I would get a head start on the eCommerce plugin.
Sellxed WooCommerce Barclaycard ePDQ Plugin
We were using WooCommerce as the ecommerce platform and the official plugin as promoted by Barclaycard is by sellxed and its not cheap at £140.00 but they do offer telephone support. They are based in Switzerland and conversion to english of some of the instructions could be improved for but I got the plugin installed and ready to test.
Barclaycard ePDQ
Finally access was granted to ePDQ and although I could only see GBP I started to link the account with WooCommerce and raised a ticket regarding adding the additional currency. I was informed by support that the currency account was still in the process of being set up and I would have access soon. Separate account? Yes GBP has one account ID and currency a separate account ID and they both have to be accessed individually. But the official WooCommerce plugin only has a field for one account so how do will that work.
Back to Sellxed who to be fair to them did try and resolve the situation and contacted Barclaycard on my behalf:
I just talked to Paul from Barclaycard. I asked if there is any solution for merging both accounts into a new one. That’s what Paul replied: Using all currencies in one account isn’t possible. Barclaycard doesn’t allow that, therefore more than one account needs to be configured to allow multiple currencies.
Sellxed also offered to customize their plugin to facilitate the additional account but I had waited too long and didn’t want to be their guinea pig on this one and they refunded the cost of the plugin.
How Barclaycard Expect Your Multi-currency eCommerce site to work
I had a good chat with one of the Barclaycard ePDQ support guys who did try his best to help but basically it transpired that multi-currency was a bit of a bolt on and in the future it will be integrated into one account. The irony is the Barclays merchant account which this settles into is one of the few that does offer one account and multiple-currencies and this is what we will be having SagePay settle into (once Barclays have changed the Merchant account, still waiting…).
So how do Barclaycard expect you to process multi-currency. Your website will have to send the transaction to the correct account which will require additional code in your shopping cart. To view your transactions you will have two accounts to log into. From a bank which claims to be one of the most technically innovative this is a poor solution.