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e-gold Programmer's Information
Many features of the e-gold system are designed to facilitate interation with other web sites and e-commerce programs. Two categories are available:
  • e-gold Shopping Cart Interface (SCI) - The e-gold SCI provides checkout capability to any e-gold account holder by allowing them to place a button on their web page to accept e-gold payments.

  • e-gold Automation Interface - These defined methods allow programmers to perform e-gold actions (spend, balance, history) via their own program.
News:
October 5, 2000 -- An updated e-gold Shopping Cart Interface Specification document is now available in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format and HTML format.

September 16, 2000 -- Some enhancements to the e-gold shopping cart interface (SCI) are in place as part of the just deployed "Voyager" maintenance release. Existing users of the shopping cart may continue to use it as they have been, or may decide to take advantage of these new features. (i.e. the changes are backward compatible).

Detailed list of changes:

  • The PAYMENT_ID field that the merchant has been able to provide as an input to https://www.e-gold.com/sci_asp/payments.asp can now be searched for in the e-gold account history of the payer and payee. It is know descriptively as the "Merchant Reference Number". It can contain up to 50 characters (alpha and/or numeric). A merchant may wish to use this data as a reference into his own book keeping system, or as an invoice number/identifier.

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  • The total amount of data capabable of being passed thru in baggage fields is increased from approximately 1k to approximately 4k.

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  • A few additional fields are provided in the information returned to the merchant via his URL input in the STATUS_URL field. These are:
  • FEEWEIGHT
  • TIMESTAMPGMT
  • V2_HASH
    • FEEWEIGHT is the weight in ounces of the fee charge to the recipient of the e-metal spend by e-gold Ltd. to receive the payment. (This is the 1% of total weight capped at 50 cents maximum). This field, along with the field ACTUAL_PAYMENT_OUNCES can be used to calculate the NET weight received:

    NET_WEIGHT = ACTUAL_PAYMENT_OUNCES - FEEWEIGHT

    TIMESTAMPGMT is a time tag of when the transaction took place. It is the number of seconds since January 1, 1970.

    V2_HASH is an MD5 hash similar to the original HANDSHAKE_HASH (which remains present). The V2_HASH is constructed by performing an MD5 calculation on a string built up by concatenating the other fields returned to the STATUS_URL with inter-field delimiter of a ":" character, specifically the MD5 hash of :

    PAYMENT_ID:PAYEE_ACCOUNT:PAYMENT_AMOUNT:PAYMENT_UNITS:PAYMENT_METAL_ID:PAYMENT_BATCH_NUM:PAYER_ACCOUNT:AlternateMerchantPassphraseHash:ACTUAL_PAYMENT_OUNCES:USD_PER_OUNCE:FEEWEIGHT:TIMESTAMPGMT
    This is essentially the original hash with the addition of delimiters between fields, and the additional fields: ACTUAL_PAYMENT_OUNCES, USD_PER_OUNCE, FEEWEIGHT, TIMESTAMPGMT

    The hash check page provided by e-gold is updated to compute both the original HANDSHAKE_HASH and the new V2_HASH. Visit it at:
    https://www.e-gold.com/acct/md5check.html

    These changes to the e-gold shopping cart should provide even higher security for verifying the information returned to users.


    e-gold Shopping Cart Interface (SCI):

    The e-gold system provides a method for merchants (large and small) to accept e-gold payments. Receive notification via email or HTTPS connection from our secure server that you have received payment.
    Take a look at our shopping cart interface specification. (150k PDF) and our Interactive Calculator to compare the cost of doing business with Credit Cards vs. e-gold.
    Mal's e-commerce and PayForIt have integrated the e-gold shopping cart into their shopping cart products if you wish to leave the coding to someone else. Also see Stegemann & Co. for e-gold shopping cart solutions, specializing in BeOS server software.


    e-gold Automation Interface: