Feature Project - Electronic Gift Cards for Card Commerce &Eason
TEKenable were commissioned by Card Commerce Ltd ( www.card-commerce.com ) to design, build, implement and support a Card Payments system ("Pay Plus").
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PayPlus is a payment card system which provides retailers with plastic card‘vouchers’ that, once loaded with value, can be used time and time again by customers and reloaded with value at any time. PayPlus cards function as a prepaid host based stored value card. Card Commerce approached TEKenable because of our experience and capabilities in .NET development and Financial systems. The PayPlus system is a product which will be sold into many vertical sectors, its first reference client being Eason & Sons.
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Eason deployed PayPlus to service in excess of 50 retail outlets in North and South of Ireland in November 2004 replacing their paper gift vouchers completely. Eason reported a 37% increase in Gift Card/Voucher sales in their O'Connell street HQ over the critical Christmas trading period and are delighted with the system.
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The PayPlus System was wholly developed using .NET technologies including C#, ASP.NET and web services. The product was submitted to Microsoft for testing and was awarded the valued ".NET Connected" logo as well as the Microsoft platform certification for Windows Server 2003.
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The Technical Details
PayPlus integrates directly with the Eason EPOS point of sale systems communicating using a protocol very similar to APACS 30 enabling the Eason tills to treat the PayPlus system as a form of Credit Card provider. Messages are accepted from the tills by a Protocol Manager which provides the till messaging interface.
Written in C# as a multi-threaded asynchronous messaging service the Protocol Manager relays the request from the till to the Communication Manager and the responses back to the tills. The protocol Manager can be deployed as a single central service or multiple instances run within stores or regional headquarters for scalability and resilience.
Requests are relayed to and from the Protocol Manager using SOAP compliant web services.
The Communications Manager (ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Web Services) locates the database engine (SQL Server) and invokes the core transaction processing with the database engine.
Comprehensive resilience is provided through the operation of a hot stand-by database, physically remote from the main server on which all processing is duplicated.
The system is administered through a comprehensive web interface (ASP.NET and Web Services) which provides for comprehensive reporting as well as the usual administrative functions.
TEKenable developed the system in three months and are providing support to all Card Commerce Customers as a part of our commitment to total service.
For more details of Card Commerce please see www.card-commerce.com, for further details of TEKenable services please Contact Us.