Extend payment processor for physical Square payments

Hi,

Thanks for the detailed message.

1. The payment framework of Vik Booking was coded with the exact intent of making it extendable through custom and native WordPress plugins that simply declare the proper hooks which will be triggered by Vik Booking. In our official website you can find the technical documentation that shows how to create a custom payment plugin for Vik Booking. Such payment plugin will not be compatible with any other WordPress plugin except for ours (Vik Booking, Vik Rent Car, Vik Rent Items, Vik Appointments, Vik Restaurants etc..). This means that no Square integration for WooCommerce or other WordPress plugins would work with Vik Booking as we have developed our own payment framework.

Just for your information, we do have a commercial add-on for Square which was obviously developed by our company. You can find it in the Payments section on our website. That’s a plugin that works with Vik Booking and all our Vik plugins. It is what you should code on your own if you wanted to be able to process and collect payments through Square.

Please notice that payment plugins will run only in the front-end section of your website, when guests visit their booking details page, and a payable amount is due. It would not be possible to display the interface of a payment method in the admin section of your website. Only refunds could be implemented in the payment plugins for Vik Booking, and these would work also for manual refund transactions via admin (back-end).

2. You should not rely on Zapier to handle the payment process, as that’s a feature that requires a specific payment plugin to be available. However, the Pro (commercial) version of Vik Booking comes with a pre-installed Cron Job called “Webhook Notification”, which relies on the WordPress WP-Cron core framework.
Thanks to this Cron Job, you could post JSON data to any remote URL, trigger custom hooks or run custom PHP code. This is how you could interface Vik Booking with Zapier, but as we said, this integration should not really be used to handle payments.

We hope this helps!

The VikWP Team

Thanks.

1. If at our reception, we were to use the front end of the site (while logged in as admin), and make a booking on behalf of a guest and then use the Square Reader (physical) to take the payment (not just vanilla SquareUp)?

Would the payment processor be extendable to that purpose?

Hi,

We understand the situation, and although the payment processor does start transactions in the front-end section of the website, you may not be able to actually complete the payment due to 3DS authorizations, unless you are the credit card holder.

The only way to make a booking on behalf of the client and pay for it, is to use a so called “Virtual Terminal” interface provided by the bank, but you should be in possession of the credit card details of the guest. This happens for those who use our Channel Manager and receive bookings from OTAs like Booking.com or Expedia, inclusive of the credit card details (either the card of the guest or a virtual credit card). Such offline transactions, not made by the cardholder, are called MOTO transactions, and only Virtual Terminal interfaces provided by the bank could by-pass any 3DS authentication/verification.

It would not possible for a payment plugin for Vik Booking to render a Virtual Terminal interface in the back-end (wp-admin) or front-end sections, especially because such functions are not available through APIs most of the times, and also because the system is only able to start transactions made by the guests.

You have mentioned the “Square Reader”, which I believe it to be a “POS”/physical terminal to swipe or punch-in credit cards. In this case, you still need to have the guest credit card available or to know the PAN of the card. Once you collect the payment from the card, you can just set the booking status to “Confirmed” on behalf of the guest by using the back-end section of the site.

Please let us know if this clarifies your question, or if we misunderstood anything.

Thank you,
The VikWP Team