Adjusting Magento for SEPA?

Question

By 1st of February 2014 Magento stores selling in the EU have to adjust their debit payment method acoording to SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area).

There are a few resources telling you what to consider (for German-speaking folks: SEPA and the adjustment for online shops, SEPA - changes in Magento) and an example on how it may be solved in a general store (German again: Demo-Shop PAYONE) but I'm looking for actual experience with implementing these changes. Do you have tips for / did you have problems with existing extensions or custom solutions?

Answer 1

I can recommend the 2 following (German) articles regarding this topic:

• http://t3n.de/news/sepa-lastschriftmandat-sieht-492087/
• http://www.phpgangsta.de/sepa-vorbereitungen

Especially the comments in the second article are interesting.

The biggest problem for a merchant is, that you will definitely need a signature for the debit payment to be on the safe side. But this is a huge barrier for ecommerce sites.

So the other solution would be an implementation like the one of PAYONE. In this case the customer has the right for 13 months to back post the payment. And this is a huge risk factor for merchants.

I will implement most likely the chancier solution like PAYONE in my DebitPayment extension to support a checkout in conformity with the law. Nonetheless, I will add an orders export for SEPA orders as in there are now some PHP libs available.

Answer 2

Most Payment Service Providers will update there own payment extensions to exchange the new information and store the longer bankaccount, so these should not be a real problem. If you have build your own payment solution to exchange data with your bank (for example to issue direct debit transfers), you also need to change the format of the export file that you create to a new XML format (pain.008 for direct debit or pain.001 for batch payments). You also need to change your logic to accept (and test) the BIC, IBAN accountnumber and accountname.

I just started to rebuild my direct debit extension I had made a few years ago to allow the SEPA direct debit. One advantage with the new system is that I can now issue a direct debit payment in the complete SEPA area, while in the past I could only do that for Dutch bankaccounts. As the new format is in XML it makes it a lot easier to build, but I still had some issues where my bank did not approve the new layout at import (even when the file passed all tests in there SEPA validation tool).

Answer 3

Although Payone provides the mentioned demo interface, its own Magento extension seems not to support SEPA (see https://github.com/PAYONE/magento/blob/master/app/design/frontend/base/default/template/payone/core/payment/method/form/debitpayment.phtml). :(