Has anyone switched to Element as their payment gateway or processor (or both)? If so, I am interested in your experiences so far. There was a lot of positive buzz at the conference this year about Element and many of us (on the IT side at least) were excited about what we were hearing. :)
Jason,
We are actually in the process of moving over to the gateway service that Element has. We’ve already set it up and tested it in my Test environment and will go Live with it on Nov 1st. I’m a RAMP client, so the RAMP team has done the Tessitura set up and it went really smooth and easy. We are really excited about it. All in all, the experience has been great as far as set up and configuration. I’m happy to share how it goes once we go Live next week if you’d like.
Teresa L. Dean
Tessitura Systems Director
We switched a week ago to use Element as a processor and a gateway . It went smoothly but for us there was a change in controlled batches in Tessitura – authorization and charge are happening now at the time of closing the batch, instead of cc authorization with every charge.
Sabina Spilkin
San Diego Symphony
From: Tessitura Technical Forum [mailto:forums-technical@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Jason KaiserSent: Thursday, October 25, 2012 7:29 AMTo: Sabina SpilkinSubject: [Tessitura Technical Forum] Anyone using Element? (payment gateway)
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Hi Jason -
We've been one of the guinea pigs for it... But only use it as our payment gateway. Happy to chat offline about it if you want (or if I haven't already - I've talked to a couple of people and now I'm losing track!)
- Heather
Thanks for the replies! Have any of you had any medium to large-scale on sales using the new system? Honestly, at this point my biggest concern is ensuring the technology functions correctly under a high traffic sale situation. I'm sure load testing was done through the engineering process by Tessitura and Element, but as with anything, sometimes the real world doesn't quite mesh up with test scenerios.
One issue we've had with Transcend is that occassionally we have instances where a transaction will be authorized and exist in the Transcend database, but the Tessitura side is gone. We have a nightly script that runs looking for these types of issues just in case, which then notifies us so we can issue a credit on the backend. I'm curious how these types of situations would be identified using Element since the database is offsite and I'm assuming we can't write SQL against it directly.
Hi Jason - no large onsales for us I'm afraid (or our version of large is probably tiny compared to others!). Ron Wilson is working on a download that would pull info (but not break PCI compliance) from Element and you could use locally to compare. We'll have it on our system to test next week. Fingers crossed on that!
Do you have any more info about the download that would pull info from Element? I'm curious what it is (a custom application, some sort of script, report on the website, etc.)? I'd hope it allows some sort of automatic running that does not require a user to log into their system and check daily.
I've only seen proof of concept stuff, but not the actual thing (report? procedure? service?) yet. Stay tuned for further details...
We've used Element since September 26 against TransFirst 4 merchant accounts using the new Tessitura payment gateway server without difficulty. Setup was easy.
Out load hasn't been massive, so I cannot address your concern on that front. We HAVE had a couple of situations where ticket orders were interrupted mid-process and the system rolled back correctly.
Element provides a user interface for reviewing, managing, and downloading detailed activity reports from one's Element accounts.
Deposits into our bank account through Element/TransFirst have so far matched Tessitura credit card payment reports perfectly.
Jim
You do have to be up to v. 11.04 or request the 11.04 version of the PGS to work.
Thanks that is good to know. Sounds like you may have been one of the first to move to Element. And it sounds like it has been pretty smooth overall. I'm assuming the setup is simply a matter of changing where the payment gateway points within Tessitura, as well as setting up your merchants on the Element side?
Hey Jason -
The Tessitura set up is super easy (provided you have the right payment gateway version) and does just involve changing the config file. (Although I wouldn't do it without Tessitura supervision!)
Merchant setup is, well, merchant set up. Full of niggly bits and pieces, but no worse than other set ups. Do make sure to run a couple of test charges through and make sure they show up on your bank statements before flipping to live.
Heather, are you using Element as your processor as well, or simply as a gateway?
Jeanne
From: Tessitura Technical Forum [mailto:forums-technical@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Heather Kraft Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 1:13 PM To: Jeanne DeVore Subject: Re: [Tessitura Technical Forum] Anyone using Element? (payment gateway)
Hi Jeanne!
Just a gateway for us. The set up from the Tessitura side would be the same, but I imagine the merchant set up might be a bit more effort.
Exactly. Element sends a VAR sheet appropriate to your merchant services provider, you send the VAR sheets back, they send you email confirmations with all information you need to dump into your PGS ini file, which you tie into your payment methods, and you're there.