We are pleased to inform you that last week Protx successfully completed our latest VSP Payment Gateway upgrade with zero downtime involved. As a result, we have introduced some great new features and made improvements to the system that will benefit you directly.

Protx regularly update our payment platform in order to utilise the latest technology, respond to customer feedback and keep in line with the card scheme requirements.

Benefits of this latest Release:

As part of the upgrade we have introduced a wide range of new features that have been requested by you to improve your day-to-day use of the system. This time round you will see some enhancements to the functionality of VSP Admin:

• Extensions have been made to the VSP Admin transaction list page, for example Authenticated transactions that have been Cancelled or Archived will now show alongside those waiting Authorisation.
  
  
• There is now a record of which user has performed different functions (such as Refund, Repeat) in the Transaction Detail screen.
  
  
• Improvements have been made to the VSP Admin Batch reports allowing you to view any re-sent payment files thus simplifying bank reconciliation.
  
  
• The CSV reporting function has been extended to include Deferred transactions awaiting release and to allow you to sort the order of your transactions.

We have also extended the fraud screening tools available allowing you to place further restrictions on the orders you accept and reduce the number of chargebacks you receive:

• 3D Secure is now available to Bank of Ireland merchants, and 3D Secure rounding amount errors have been corrected.
  
  
• You can now block specific ranges of Customer IP Addresses (or countries of origin) and particular card ranges (or issuing countries of origin) allowing you to prevent repeated fraudulent purchases from particular locations or card numbers.

Some changes have also been made to Continuous Authority transactions to reduce their failure rate. For example, the expiry date is no longer checked on this transaction type. However, you will no longer be able to submit Maestro and Solo cards to Continuous Authority accounts because this is against the card scheme rules.

Other benefits of the upgrade include fixes to the formatting of the Vendor email template and Japanese Yen formatting errors, improvements to the payment systems to prevent the doubling up of single quotes (') in the name and email address fields and the correction of content type errors in emails hosted by Mac email clients.

Further details of the upgrade can be found on our forum by clicking on the web address below:

https://support.protx.com/forum/Topic5903-31-1.aspx

We hope that you will benefit from these new features. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated and if you have any suggestions on additional ways we can improve our payment system please email us at feedback@protx.com.

Protx Ltd is moving offices on the 20th July 2007.

Customer facing Support will close early on Friday 20th July and normal Protx support hours will NOT resume until Monday 23rd July:

This means Over the weekend of the 21st and 22nd July there will be NO email or telephone support.

N.B. Our payment services will not be disrupted and will continue to operate in the normal way. Our systems will be monitored and supported as usual.

Our new support contact number will be: 0845 111 4455 (option 4).

Our new contact address will be:

Protx Limited
Holborn Hall
100 Gray's Inn Road
London
WC1X 8AL

We apologise in advance for any inconvenience caused.

Protx currently offer VSP Form and VSP Server merchants the facility to customise the payment pages presented to their customers. From August 2007, Protx will be offering a New and improved payment screen presentation process, allowing a simpler and more complete customisation process. Unfortunately, due to the New system not being compatible with the old WC@ templates, we will not be able to import existing templates into the New system. If you currently have custom templates operating on your payment page, you will be given New templates to customise.

Due to the current templates becoming obsolete, we have now halted any further uploading of the current templates to the Protx Test and Live Servers. Any current templates will cease to exists on the Test server as of 1st July 2007 (1st August 2007 on the Live Server), any Vendor using Custom Templates will automatically be assigned the default Protx templates.

N.B: Not having a customised template WILL NOT prevent you from trading online.


Benefits of the new customised templates

• The new system allows for an easier customisation process of colours, font types, backgrounds and logo images.



• You will have more flexibility over the look and feel of the payment pages, and changes can be made easily and as often as you like through the use of XML/XSLT and CSS files.



• The CSS styles you create will apply to all pages, including error and help pages, so the look and feel will be more consistent.



• The templates can be tested and viewed on your own servers prior to being sent to us for upload removing any issues which can currently be encountered when uploaded.



• The new templates will have the capacity to be multi-lingual dependant on the shoppers browsers, however, until further notice we will only be able to support English.

What are the next steps?

We are anticipating that the New Customisable Templates will be available mid July for you to customise in time for August. Once you have customised the newly formatted payment pages templates, you will need to zip the files up and email them templates@protx.com. We will validate them and upload them to the test server for you to sign off before putting them Live.

The new custom templates will be ready in July and we expect the new templates to be a popular feature. Therefore our support response time for this type of query will be 7 -14 days, as we need to ensure that we give priority to Live support queries.

We apologise for any inconvenience that this change may cause you but it is a necessary update we need to make to ensure we can continue to provide both you and your customers with an efficient and more streamlined payment process and a more up-to-date payment page.

Changes to 'PreAuth' Payment Type June 2007

N.B. As of 1st November 2006 we can no longer provide the PreAuth payment type as an option to new Protx vendors. The PreAuth payment type will still work for existing vendors who already have this payment type enabled, but only until 31st July 2007.

As of 1st August 2007 the PreAuth payment type will no longer be a service that Protx provide. As an alternative to the PreAuth/Repeat service, we will introduce the new Authenticate/Authorise Payment Types. Full details of these new payment types can be viewed from the links below;