So I have been using Authorize.net now for over 3 years and overall it is a great service and very reliable. Wondferul customer service and overall a high quality product. However, there are serveral features that my company has been hoping Authorize.net would add over these 3 years. We are users of the ARB, CIM, AIM, and eCheck products. We have implememted Authorize.net's API extensively throughout our system and the deeper we got into implenting the API, the more we realized there were a few fundamental features we felt were missing. Each feature that we feel would benefit the entire community of Authorize.net users, not just ourselves, are listed below:
#1: The ability to retrieve how many payments are left on an ARB subscription
- Reason for feature:
- We offer a payment plan for customers who signup for our service. Once they signup for a payment plan, we setup a subscription to draft $50 every 2 weeks for 7 occurrences. However, they can make payments ahead of time through their customer account. So what happens is a customer will pay everything off except for the final $50 and there might still be 3 occurrences left on the subscription. There is no way for us to check how many occurrences are left using the API and our customer will be overcharged $100 becuase of this. If we could check to see how many occurrences were left using the API, then we could notify our system and catch this before the customer is overcharged. This leads into our second feature request.
#2: Create a subscription from a previous payment a customer has made through an API call
- Reason for feature:
- Currently, the only way to create a new subscription from a past payment is to login in the Merchant Interface, click on the Transaction ID, then click Create ARB Subscription from Transaction. Using the Feature #1 request above as the example, if we could check how many occurences were left and we saw that there are still 3 occurrences left but the customer only owes $50, we could cancel the subscrption through an API call and then create a new subscription from a past payment. This would save me and my team many, many hours each week if this could be done through the API. If it is available already through the Merchant Interface, it should be avialable through the API.
#3: Retrieve the next date the subscription is going to occur
- Reason for feature:
- So we can track how many subscriptions are going to occur on any given day
By adding the features above, especially the first two, this would save me and so many other companies so much time. Maybe these features are already in the works, maybe they aren't, either way, I hope we can get these features soon. It has been 3 years and a lot of hoping but nothing has happened yet. Better late than never!
