Many payment gateways provide demo/test accounts using a sandbox server: PayPal, USA ePay, and First Data, to name a few. I will use First Data as an example since I'm very familiar with it.

The First Data Global Gateway (FDGG) is a popular payment gateway for merchant accounts at local banks. AmeriCommerce integrates with the newest FDGG product called "e4" as well as the older FDGG products formerly known as "LinkPoint" and "YourPay."

First Data provides free demo/test accounts which developers can use to test their e-commerce integrations in a very realistic way without using any money. Although AmeriCommerce already provides a Test button, all this does is verify the connection with the payment gateway by using a bogus credit card number on a live account. First Data demo/test accounts actually accept test credit card numbers and allow the transaction to go to completion, which is much better.

It would be very easy to add a configuration option to the First Data, LinkPoint, and YourPay payment methods to toggle between live accounts and demo/test accounts. It's a really simple code change.

All you need to do is modify the host name when you call the First Data API. For example, the live host name for the new First Data Global Gateway e4 product is

api.globalgatewaye4.firstdata.com

and the demo host name is

api.demo.globalgatewaye4.firstdata.com

Similarly, the live host name for LinkPoint is

secure.linkpt.net

and the test host name is

staging.linkpt.net

You can learn more about e4 demo accounts here:

https://firstdata.zendesk.com/entries/21510561-Global-Gateway-e4-Demo-Accounts

You can learn more about LinkPoint test accounts on pages 63-67 of the manual found here:

http://www.firstdata.com/downloads/marketing-merchant/fdgg-api-user-manual.pdf

Can you please support demo/test accounts for all the payment gateways that provide sandbox servers? This would enable us to test our online stores much more thoroughly before going live.

Thank you for considering my feature request!

Fred Chapman

Dwolla is a new, Paypal alternative that is getting great traction (they're moving upwards of $40 Million per month). It draws funds directly from the customers bank account and only charges business owners 25 cents per charge. That's it. There are no hidden fees or monthly payments and any charge under $10 is free.

It has some cool features like social payments and physical store use, which customers can take advantage of if they create an account (through your store's checkout process). However, a guest check out option is available to the customer as well.

Check them out at Dwolla.com for more info and vote!

Disclaimer: I am not in ANY way affiliated with Dwolla. I'm just an opportunist looking to save my business money any way that I can.

In store version 2013.2.312.6 the canonical tag being added by AmeriCommerce is made of relative links instead of the preferred absolute linking method.

From Google:
==
Can the link be relative or absolute?

rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.
(http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394)
==

Example:
Store Category URL: http://www.americommercestore.com/category.html

Canonical tag:
...
<link rel="canonical" href="/category.html" />
<link rel="next" href="/category.html?pi=2" />
...

Current Base tag:
...
<base target="_self">
</head>
...

The preferred linking method is with Absolute links

Preferred Canonical tag:
...
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.americommercestore.com/category.html"; />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.americommercestore.com/category.html?pi=2"; />
...

If Relative URLs are a must-use for AC, then a way to set to base link to the store URL is needed.

Preferred Base tag:
...
<base href="http://www.americommercestore.com"; target="_self">
</head>
...

To use a custom domain name with an AmeriCommerce site, we must point the domain to the AmeriCommerce name servers. That means AmeriCommerce hosts all the DNS records for the domain.

To set up a domain-based email service like Microsoft Outook.com or Google Apps, someone needs to create MX and TXT records for the domain. I would rather do this myself, but AmeriCommerce does not make that possible. DNS record changes have to be done by creating a support ticket, and that can take multiple iterations over the course of several days. I could do it myself in minutes if I had the capability.

Please let us edit our own DNS records. (Web hosting accounts based on cPanel support this, and even WordPress.com accounts support this as a premium upgrade.) This capability will make AmeriCommerce a more attractive platform to web designers, web developers, and IT consultants who want to provide comprehensive online solutions for their clients.

Thank you,

Fred Chapman

Currently, if there is more than one percentage discount that applies to an item, each discount is taken off the base price. Example:

The way I want it to work:
$19.95 base price
-10% ($2.00)
= $17.95
-75% ($13.46)
= $4.49 total

The way it actually works:
$19.95
-10% ($2.00)
= $17.95
-75% (which is taken off the 19.95, so $14.96)
= $2.99 total

Multiple discounts should come off in a set order, not all off the base price, this makes no sense. Any retail store I've shopped at takes discounts in order. Some of our orders are ending up FREE due to this way of calculating.

When you go into the design mode of the admin console it is easy to change some things that you click on, but sometimes when you click on a picture, link, text, etc. it will select all the similar things on that page and edit them, it will also edit similar things on any page of your website. I want to be able to select ONLY what i want to change and for the change to be made ONLY to that exact thing I have selected. An example is on my category pages a few of the images are different shapes/sizes so they dont all line up the same, instead of editing the actual picture and re-importing it i want to be able to add a top margin, or padding, etc. to just that picture. This would make designing your website so much easier and you wouldnt have to worry about changing the CSS for several pages when you only want to change one thing.

It is hard to manage dropdown menus in americommerce. You can only edit the CSS for the entire dropdown menu and not specif parts of the dropdown menus. For example I want to be able to change the color of some dropdowns, I also want to make dropdown menus that have over a certain amount of links on them to split into more than one column. Let say i have a manufacturer's dropdown list that includes 50 manufacturers, i dont want to have to scroll down the page to view all of them, i want to split the list into more than one column.

Stripe is a new payment gateway. It handles all of the hassle of processing CC payments and doesn't require users to obtain a merchant account. The fee per charge is the standard 2.9% + 30 cents but it does not charge a monthly fee. It simply processes the charge and deposits the funds into your designated bank account. Many new shopping carts have integrated this gateway and i'd like to see it added to AmeriCommerce.

see stripe.com for more details

Disclaimer: Nope, I don't work for them. I'm only trying to make the CC processing hassle easier for all of us.