Rating: 1 star
I’ve used stripe’s plugin for years. Very solid. But wanted to try Helcim, which seems to be a great Canadian company with honest policies. But their woocommerce plugin is weak and not frequently updated. Couple of key issues:
They don’t support USD purchases. Our store is set up for CAD and USD but the plugin fails ungracefully if someone wants to pay in USD.
They don’t handle order refunds/voids transparently. If I create an order in the backend and then minutes later refund it via the WC backend, as I do in Stripe (eg a live test after a software update), the helcim plugin should understand that it needs to void/null the transaction at Helcim rather than refund it. Instead, it tries to refund it and fails outright with no clear idea why. In speaking with Helcim support (which initially I found quite unresponsive after creating a ticket), they grudgingly admitted that that might be a function they should support.
I had a long interview with a junior product manager in Calgary some days later and he did not seem to really know much about woocommerce or wordpress. I spent 30-40 minutes teaching him, and he asked a lot of super basic questions. I told him that if they want more than 300 installations of their plugin, they need to make it way better. It just has to work, like 99% of other wordpress plugins do. At the point I spoke to him, their plugin hadn’t been updated in a year, which speaks of lackadaisical attention to it. So, as much as I want to send business their way, we’re an ecommerce store, not a point of sale terminal shop, and I guess I’ll have to wait until they get their ecommerce act together.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
Flawless plugin and great customer support – best thing we ever did was change over to Helcim. This update is really solid but you will have to reconfigure one of the keys with the newest version – customer support will walk you through in minutes to adjust your CRM,
]]>Rating: 1 star
Helcim support was not aware that woocommerce account creation at checkout is not implemented & freezes the page if the user attempts to make a purchase that matches that scenario.
It would be nice if they were to change things so:
– The product support all native features of the Woocommerce checkout page
– The documentation mentions native features that are not supported if there are any
– Give an error message instead of freezing the checkout page (fail gracefully at least please)
– Train their staff not to tell people the feature is not available because of some “limitations”, when in fact Helcim chose not to implement it.
If anyone has some magic way to make this work, I’m all ears.
Thanks for listening.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
Helcim has done a great job with their plugin. It’s straight forward and easy to use and they offer great support via email or telephone to help if you need it.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
Needed a solution for processing transactions and this one works great. Detailed instructions provided so installation and testing is straight-forward.
Thanks Helcim!
]]>Rating: 5 stars
works great!Great plugin! Friendly Staff!
canada, credit cards, payment processing, woocommerce
]]>Rating: 5 stars
This review has been updated as of 2.20.2018
In a previous review I had outlined some of my frustrations with the Helcim plugin and indicated that this plugin was not ready for use in production. I am happy to report that as of the latest update to v1.1, the development team at Helcim has addressed my concerns and made considerable improvements to their plugin. The most notable improvement is that all transactions that receive a declination code now are marked as “Pending” which is important for auditing the purchase history, determining if customers are having difficulty completing checkout and allowing automated processes like abandoned shopping cart follow-ups to trigger as they are supposed to.
I will be putting this plugin back into service to hopefully get away from the higher rates of my current payment processor and switch everything to Helcim. I love Helcim’s cost-plus pricing and the potential for cost savings is huge.
I owe a big thanks to the Helcim team for addressing these concerns and staying committed to the Canadian marketplace.
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