topic Re: AIM: Holding a payment in Integration and Testing

AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:09:31 GMT

Alright, I did as much searching as I could, I figure it would be better just to ask about my situation.

I have already developed a platform for endorsed marketing. In other words, businesses use celebrities to market.

Because of the amounts that these payments may be, we have to accept the business' payment BEFORE we pay the celebrity.

Now, here's the catch. Our merchant account was granted on the basis that we wait until the celebrity approves their endorsement before we charge the business. So, to make it simple to understand, here is how our process has to be:

1. Business selects endorsement type, goes to checkout

2. Business checkouts with their payment information

3. Internal filtering processes happen

4. Business final approval

5. Celebrity final approval

6. BUSINESS CHARGED

7. Celebrity paid

Now, the obvious glaring issue here, is that if the business is declined or has insufficient funds, the celebrity has already approved their endorsement and will expect to get paid. In other words, our company would have to front that bill and hope to God the business comes through later.

So, after all this, my question becomes, is there a way at STEP 2 above that we can signal via AIM that we want to hold those funds until the celebrity can approve? Since we can't charge via our merchant account agreement until after the celebrity agrees, we would have to hold a certain amount until we can finalize the sale.

Thanks in advance for responses, and I welcome any alternate methods I could be using as well.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

RaynorC1emen7 — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 18:05:41 GMT

you can do a auth_only for the full amount. and it will hold for (from what I read here) 7 to 30 days depend on the card issuer.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 18:46:29 GMT

Thank you for the response. This sounds like the type of thing I need.

I will try to figure all of this out (I'm sifting through the SDK/examples, a lot to take in at first), and if I have any more questions I will post them in this thread. I'll mark the answer as the solution as soon as I have impelmented what I need.

I appreciate the time/help.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

RichardH — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:38:42 GMT

You can find details about performing an Authorization Only and Prior Authorization and Capture in the AIM Implementation Guide.

Richard

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:45:09 GMT

Richard,

That guide is beautiful. I haven't stumbled onto it yet but it has a lot of good information.

I actually am putting e-commerce into two of our sites. I am continuing to sift/implement the solutions. I will continue to keep any questions in this thread as I go along.

Thanks so much for all the help.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 23:37:01 GMT

Alright, sorry for the long pause. Had other fires to tend to in the past week.

Here is another problem:

Apart from the celebrity platform above, we also have a full written site that onboards new clients for a different service we offer. Thus, we are doing recurring subscriptions.

I followed the API, and I wrote a test application that seems to work. However, it only works with the test api URL, I.E.

https://apitest.authorize.net/xml/v1/request.api.

Now this may be a silly question, but what would be the post URL for both testing and the live server? I tried test.authorize.net, however it errors out on the response (Error 405 Method not allowed). Would it work on the live server when I'm ready to go into live test mode?

Thanks in advance for the support.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

RaynorC1emen7 — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:16:04 GMT

https://api.authorize.net/xml/v1/request.api

need production loginID and transactionKey.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:22:54 GMT

Raymond,

Just to be clear, you are saying I would need a production login/key to do this on test.authorize.net and the live site? My developer login/key works for single card transcation tests (on test.authorize.net). But, if you are saying our production login/key would solve that problem when trying to test recurring transactions, I will give it a shot.

Thanks for the response.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

RaynorC1emen7 — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:43:53 GMT

Test loginID/TransactionKey only work on https://apitest.authorize.net/xml/v1/request.api

Production loginID/TransactionKey only work on https://api.authorize.net/xml/v1/request.api

To test on Production run it in testmode and with testCC# to make sure it didn't get charge. No transaction will be create either.

Read

Test Accounts vs. Live Accounts – Which Does What Anyway?

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 01:05:03 GMT

Alright, I think I got you. The AIM version of transactions and the recurring API are two different links.

Makes sense.

For now I am good to go, but I'm sure I will be back! :)

Thanks again for the help.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 05:52:41 GMT

Alright, new question.

I have everything I need working on our onboarding site except one thing.

paysched.startDateSpecified =True

paysched.totalOccurrencesSpecified =False

paysched.trialOccurrencesSpecified =False

When I do the above in my recurring billing library on the payment schedule, and try to create a subscription it tells me that "the total occurences cannot be zero" and the "trial occurrences must be less than total occurences".

What I want to do, is have no trial, and indefinitely bill them on a recurring schedule until they go in and cancel.

What am I doing wrong here, or what can I do differently to make my preferred scenario work?

Thanks in advance for bailing me out again!

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

RaynorC1emen7 — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:23:15 GMT

Set the total occurrences to 9999 and set totalOccurrencesSpecified = true.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 03:50:28 GMT

Yeah, I had a feeling that was the only way to do it. Thanks again. All that's left is our celebrity platform, then I can finally get out of your hair for a while :).

Although from the prior thread's responses I will hopefully be able to figure it out quickly.

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:22:26 GMT

I now have everything working on the celebrity platform except one little detail.

As mentioned at the very start of this thread, I have to do a prior authorization capture because of the way our payment model has to go.

I got this working relatively pain free with credt cards.

Now I'm trying to do the exact same thing using ECheck (we let them specify a bank account also, as an alternative to credit). The authorization works great. But when I go to capture later, it says the transaction was declined every time. Is this a known problem with using test data, i.e., will it work if there was live data to capture from?

Here are my test capture code post values (assume the transaction ID is correct):

Dim post_values As New Dictionary(OfString, String)

' ADD POST VALUES

post_values.Add("x_login", LOGIN_NAME)

post_values.Add("x_tran_key", TRX_KEY)

post_values.Add("x_delim_data", "TRUE")

post_values.Add("x_delim_char", "|")

post_values.Add("x_relay_response", "FALSE")

post_values.Add("x_type", "PRIOR_AUTH_CAPTURE")

post_values.Add("x_method", "ECHECK")

post_values.Add("x_trans_id", "2173999242")

post_values.Add("x_amount", 150)

See anything wrong? Thanks for the continued support!

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:09:40 GMT

Here is the complete response, if this helps. I realize it has been declined, but I can't find a guide on this site that more specifically explains why:

-----------------------------------------------------

This transaction has been declined.

2174002699

Prior Authorization Capture

150.00

ECHECK

prior_auth_capture

-----------------------------------------------------

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

RaynorC1emen7 — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:28:04 GMT

This said max for test account is $100

http://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/Integration-and-Testing/eCheck-with-Authorizations-and-Captures/m-p/10162

Re: AIM: Holding a payment

Hurrdat_Timothy — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:28:06 GMT

That worked! Give me another couple hours to finish up coding and I will at last mark this thread complete.

You guys rock. Keep doing what you do. It helps a ton having a community resource like this.