Extracting sales, purchases and donations from Emails

Gateway Emails

The process of extracting information from the Emails generated by the payment gateways is a matter of looking for know text strings and picking out the following text.

The following Email has been marked with the known text in red, and the values to be extracted in green:

The customer Email is found by looking for "received a payment", then "(" and extracting the string "santa@northpole.com.zz" terminated by ")"
The order identifier is found by looking for "Receipt ID:" and extracting the rest of the line "2292-3284-5641-3499".
The quantity is found by looking for "Quantity:" and extracting the rest of the line "2".
and so on.

You've Received New Funds!

Dear Queanbeyan Farms Pty Ltd,

This email confirms that you have received a payment for $2.20 AUD from Santa Claus (santa@northpole.com.zz)

Receipt ID: 2292-3284-5641-3499

The number above is the buyer's receipt ID for this transaction. Please retain it for your records so that you will be able to reference this transaction for customer service.

View the details of this transaction online

It may take a few moments for this transaction to appear in the Recent Activity list on your Account Overview.

Payment Details

Total amount:		$2.20 AUD
Currency:		Australian Dollars
Item/Product Number:		WINE-CABSAV-03
Transaction ID:		2K458865GK127093V
Quantity:		2
Item/Product Name:		One dozen 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon
Buyer:		Santa Claus

Delivery Information

Address:		Santa Claus, North Pole, Antarctic.

Means of Postage:		Reindeer express

Address status:		Unconfirmed

Have you lifted your withdrawal and receiving limits? Just log in to your PayPal account and click View Limits on the Account Overview page.

Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team

Unfortunately there are over a hundred payment gateways, each with their own Email formats, each with support for shopping carts, single purchases, donations, periodic payments, merchant and customer formats - and the formats can change.

sellEbit tries to support all major formats, but we need your assistance to do so.

If sellEbit can not process your Emails from a major payment gateway please forward some problem emails (or attach as files) to us at support@sellebit.com and we will add the definition to the next release and send you a new gateway definition file to try.

We use a program to define the processing of each mail format. This program is included in the sellEbit release, so you can do it yourself. We expect that most people will ask us to do so, and this also means the mail format is defined for others.

gateway gui

gateway gui

The shown definition will process the above example Email.

You can load an Email, copy the strings from it into a mail definition, and test parsing and the extraction of the information.

Home