topic Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing in Integration and Testing

Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

manis1988 — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 11:27:24 GMT

Hi,

I am trying to integrate Authorize.net Automated recurring billing to my Company's website. I have already integrated SIM.
Few things that Concerned me about ARB :

Credit Card information is Collected from Merchant's server and Passed onto Authorize.net . (There is a Possibility that a Merchant can have Customer's Credit Card info - Major Security Risk) .
Card Code is not Processed in Automated Recurring billing , so it gets Complicated for merchant.

So i've planned to go with SIM for first Transaction and with that Results , to Create an ARB Subscription.
For that i need Card Number and Expiry date , which i can't have.

SO how do i create an ARB Subscription with a Completed Transaction , without getting Credit Card info. If this is impossible , then i suppose Authorize.net ARB won't be much of help.
(I know i can manually add Subscription from a Completed Transaction in my Merchant account, i would like an API to do this).

Manikanda raj S,
Vembu Technologies.

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

Elaine — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:14:08 GMT

You cannot create an ARB subscription from a previously successful transaction in your account via API. This option is only available to you in the merchant interface.

Perhaps you would prefer to use our CIM API instead of ARB. That would allow yout o process one-time, real-time transactions programmatically as needed by storing the customer payment information in your Authorize.Net account in customer payment profiles. This would require a bit of work on your end to write a script that would call the transaction function automatically from your end, instead of using ARB to initiate them in your Authorize.Net account, however we are curently working on getting some new functionality into the system that will likely be helpful to you with your needs. Once the new functionality has been released we will post an announcement here so keep an eye out for it if you are interested.

Thank you,

Elaine

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

manis1988 — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 08:05:29 GMT

Hi Mitch,

We need Credit Card Information to Create CIM Profiles . We need to get this Card information in our site to Create a Profile, even if we use CIM API. The thing is "We don't want to fetch Card Info on our server at all ". Can you tell me how can i achieve this ..?

Manikanda raj S,
Vembu Technologies

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

Elaine — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:50:38 GMT

Currently there is not a method available to create CIM profiles without obtaining the credit card data from your customers and submitting them to us via CIM API (or manually in your merchant interface). We are, at present, working on providing a hosted CIM solution that would allow you to transfer your customers to a page hosted on our servers for the entry of their payment information for the creation of CIM payment profiles, but it has not yet been fully released and it not publically available. When this feature becomes available you may locate information about its use in the News and Announcements section on this forum.

Thank you,

Elaine

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

insightadmin — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:15:58 GMT

I'm doing something similar. We have an online donation form. A person can make a one-time donation or an ongoing donation. I process the first transaction with AIM and if that is completed successfully and is to be ongoing I create the ARB using PHP XML code derived fromthe sample code. The ARB is created with a start date of now plus one month. The web form checks if the expiration date is now plus two months for recurring donations just as an internal policy. We don't store the credit card data for PCI reasons but since it's already in memory it's available for the ARB creation.

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

manis1988 — Wed, 11 May 2011 10:42:23 GMT

Hi,

It doesn't matter you Store or don't Store Credit Card information , What Matters is you Collect Credit Card info on your WebServer. It's all that matters. If you are not PCI Compliant, then you Shouldn't collect Card info on your server.

Elaine ,

Can we Host a Page on Authorize.net Server for ARB Transactions ? If we(merchants) can host a Page on Authorize.net Server, we don't need to care about PCI Compliance.

Manikanda raj S,

Vembu Technologies.

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

Elaine — Wed, 11 May 2011 21:28:14 GMT

ARB does not currently offer a hosted solution. If you are unable to collect payment data on your server due to compliance issues you would need to use SIM API to create a one-time, real-time transaction and then login to your merchant interface to manually create it into an ARB subscription.

If you were willing to use CIM API instead, which does offer a hosted solution, you could write your own script to call stored payment data in CIM to charge your customers routinely.

Thank you,

Elaine

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

ksawic — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:28:07 GMT

By using CIM, I still need to collect the credit card on my site. My understanding is that if I am selling a PHP cart solution to third parties, the credit card info must not be obtained by the website if I want to be out-of scope for PA-DSS compliance, regardless of $ amount of transactions done monthly.

A hosted cim would be best.

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

Michelle — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:47:30 GMT

Hello ksawic,

A hosted CIM option was one of the top-requested features we heard about from the community. And I'm happy to report that we recently released our beta version of it to the developer community, so please check out the post here for more information.

Hope that helps! :smileyhappy:

Thanks,

Michelle

Developer Community Manager

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

martin_ex — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:32:38 GMT

Hi,

we provide a service and we want to implement automated monthly billing with variable amounts. We already have an Authorize.net accout and utilize the AIM integration method. We don't store credit card information in our database and would like to keep it that way.

What would be the easiest way to implement automated billing with variable amounts?

I checked the ARB guide and ARB seems to be suitable for fixed amounts. It looks like the only option would be to send ARBUpdateSubscriptionRequest each month to change the amount. We will have to send a request each month anyway because the amount will be unknow until end of month.

Is there a better way to go than utilizing ARB? If not, will we be able tu use ARB given our situation?

Thank you & Best Regards,
Martin

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

Michelle — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 17:07:25 GMT

Hi Martin,

ARB can only be used for recurring billing with fixed amounts, as you've already noticed. What you need is our Customer Information Manager or CIM. With this service, you store your customer's information on our secure servers and can then set up recurring billing information using your customer profiles. This allows you to do recurring billing in variable amounts. You can check out the blog post here for more info and a comparison to ARB.

Thanks,

Michelle

Developer Community Manager

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

martin_ex — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:05:31 GMT

Hi Michelle,

than you for the explanation!

I integrated hosted CIM in the test mode and have one more question. Shipping Information seems to be optional. Is it possible to hide the whole section?

I tried the approach described at http://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/Integration-and-Testing/Hiding-the-Shipping-Info-portion-on-SIM-form/td-p/1606 but this seems to have no effect on the hosted CIM form.

Thank you!

Martin

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

Trevor — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:04:17 GMT

No, it is not possible to hide the shipping information option if you are using the manage profiles page. The only way to avoid this would be instead to only prompt your customers directly with pages to create or update their payment profiles and not load the whole page.

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

WHeisenberg — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:21:19 GMT

I was really not expecting this.. but it happened by accident and seems to contradict what's been explained here about the shipping info display on the Hosted CIM system.

I'm using a test account to get the CIM system working. I've managed to get all the individual parts working and am now just in the process of integrating all that mess into my own system. No problems there.

This isn't really a 'problem', but I'm using my TEST account information for all of these processes.

When we logged in to the LIVE account, and changed the form field parameters to remove the shipping information fields from the Hosted CIM screen, they were removed from the screen as requested.. but they were removed from the screen on the test account.

This is no big deal because the test account doesn't need the shipping fields to be shown either.. but how is it that by changing those settings in the live account did the resulting screen change on the test account?

I'm assuming that it is because of the domain name that is sending the information to the server.

Like I said, it isn't causing any problems at all.. it was just unexpected.

Also, this pretty much answers the questions that was asked about how to remove the shipping address fields from the hosted CIM page. You just manually uncheck them as being displayed in your merchant login screen.

At least, that's what made our's dissappear.

WHeis

Re: Need Something More in Automated Recurring Billing

clawlor — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:38:09 GMT

WHeisenberg,

I'm having a hard time finding where on Authorize.NET I can disable the shipping address, could you point me in the right direction?