Switch & Solo Cards with Website Payments Pro UK (Payflow) and XMLPay

Posted on March 9th, 2007 by cody | Filed in

While implementing support for PayPal Website Payments Pro UK in ActiveMerchant I ran across a small problem while processing the UK cards Switch & Solo.

Switch & Solo cards are a special case when processing credit cards, as they need some additional information. The additional information is either the card issue number or start date, as printed on the card. The problem is that the XMLPay guide provided by PayPal doesn't exactly specify where to put this information. If you dig around in the schema it appears as though you can place the CardIssue or CardStart element within a Level3Invoice element, however that didn't seem to work, and always returned the error "Field format error: CARDSTART or CARDISSUE must be present"

After some trial and error, and a helping hand in the right direction from Todd Sieber at PayPal, I was finally able to successfully process the Switch & Solo cards using the ExtData elements within the Card element of the XML request:

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<Card>
  <CardType>Switch</CardType>
  <CardNum>5641820000000005</CardNum>
  <ExpDate>200801</ExpDate>
  <NameOnCard>Cody Fauser</NameOnCard>
  <CVNum>123</CVNum>
  <ExtData Name='CardIssue' Value='01'/>
  <ExtData Name='CardStart' Value='0299'/>
</Card>

You only need either the CardIssue or CardStart element to be present, but for illustrative purposes I included them both.

One other thing to note is that XMLPay API will no longer be updated by PayPal. So if you are writing new code then you might as well just stick to the Name-Value pair API.

7 Responses to “Switch & Solo Cards with Website Payments Pro UK (Payflow) and XMLPay”

  1. Todd Zaki Warfel Says:
    March 13th, 2007 at 09:29 PM

    Jus curious where you're hosting at. We're looking for a good RoR host and are fed up with MediaTemple. Their GridServers have been letting us down several times a week.

  2. Cody Fauser Says:
    March 14th, 2007 at 01:40 AM

    We have a bunch of servers at Jaded Pixel and I'm hosted on one of them. This site used to be hosted with TextDrive, but the server I was on wasn't 100% reliable.

  3. SWS Says:
    March 18th, 2007 at 12:30 AM

    I am trying to get this to work however the message I receive is as follows :

    Invalid Data This transaction cannot be processed. Please enter a valid credit card number and type.10527

    Error Invalid Data A Start Date or Issue Number is required.10567

    Cardtype is set to Switch and I am passing the info for start date and issue number as above !

  4. Cody Fauser Says:
    March 27th, 2007 at 04:07 PM

    Is the account that you're testing with a PayPal Website Payments Pro UK account?

  5. Henry Says:
    April 25th, 2007 at 12:39 PM

    Is there any further news / developments on this issue? I am facing the same problems when trying to use 1shoppingcart.com and integrating with PayPal Web Payments Pro (UK). Visa and Mastercard transactions are fine, but Maestro or Solo transactions return the error code 10527.

    I'm spending hours on the phone to PayPal (or in their phone queue) being passed around departments, but with no one knowing about the problem, let alone a solution.

  6. Cody Fauser Says:
    April 26th, 2007 at 04:07 AM

    I guess you could always switch to Shopify, as we have flawless support for PayPal Website Payments Pro UK.

  7. keith Says:
    May 27th, 2007 at 01:05 PM

    Do you know of a integration guide for PayPal UK WPP and Active Merchant?

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