SkyBank PrestaShop Module

I had an interesting experience with a module this week and I think it deserves to be written about. I had a client that was using a gateway called SkyBank, I hadn’t heard of them so I did not think there was a PrestaShop integration for their gateway. In searching there is actually one and it comes from the

PrestaShop Addons Store.

Setting it up

Setting it up was fairly straight forward but I noticed a few things that I have not seen before with a PrestaShop payment gateway that piqued my interest. Below is a screen shot of the module configuration screen so you can see what I mean.

Most of the settings are normal payment gateway settings, but there are a few that stand out for me. Mainly it is the autoship, the option to take checks, and the cron setting. I haven’t seen these before in another PrestaShop module so I honestly did not know what they did, but they sounded interesting.

Awesome features

So in looking through the documentation I figured out the ACH was about accepting electronic checks, that is pretty straight forward. But the autoship was actually pretty cool. What it does is allows people to create orders and have them shipped automatically at their choosing, kind of like Amazon. On the front end of the shop it looks like this.

Customers can chose the interval between their orders to have them shipped. This is great for sites that sell consumables that people will need at set intervals, like e-cigarette juice, razor blades, or even dog food. They can also manage their auto-ship order from their account so they can delete or change the interval of the auto-ship.

<img class=”aligncenter wp-image-1746 size-full” src=”https://dh42.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/skybank-manage-autoship.png” alt=”Skybank Manage Autoship” width=”826” height=”498” /

And here is the order management area.

From the backoffice you get a very similar view since the module installs a new menu item in your order tab. In the new menu item you have the ability to manage the auto-ship orders, the module even marks the orders as auto-shipped in your order view, so you can accurately look over the orders and know where they came from. Here is a view of the back office autos-ship area, before any orders were entered.

The more I read the documentation for this module, the more I was blown away. I have worked with dozens of payment modules for PrestaShop and not seen one that comes close to this feature set, even some of the expensive paid ones. I looked into the code on how the auto-ship works and it is pretty sound. What it does is store the customers credit or debit card number on the gateway, then it uses a token to charge their card back. That way you are not storing credit card information in your shop, the gateway is handling it all.

Another interesting feature I noticed was how it handled refunds. When a payment is made, it only gives the choice to void, not to refund the payment. I thought that was weird, but reading about it made me understand what it was doing. If a payment has not yet batched, you can void a payment and the customer will get the money back to their account immediately. If you refund the payment at that point, it will take them a couple of days to get the money back. That is a pretty awesome customer service feature. So once the payment has batched, the void button changes over to a refund button that will let you refund a whole order, or just a partial refund of any amount you want. That is a feature I have always liked, because sometimes you need to retroactively give an unsatisfied customer a discount.

Bottom Line

I have been developing in PrestaShop for 5 or 6 years now, it is not very often that I am surprised by a module, but this one truly surprised me. It really opens the door to a lot of possibilities of things that used to require expensive custom development. From the testing I did with my clients shop everything seemed to work flawlessly as well. I would highly recommend this module to all of my clients looking for a payment gateway.