AIM and ARB - Recurring Billing

[Wstar]

I'm setting up a subscription site with AIM and ARB intergration.  Once a member signs up, I have an AIM transaction which processes right away and updates their account infrormation.  I then do a ARB transaction with a date of + 1 month.

My question is, what is the "recurringBilling" setting for AIM transactions?  There is no documentation on what this is on the XML guild.

Any information was be greatful.

Thanks

[stymiee]

It just allows you to mark a transaction as being part of a recurring billing subscription. It's just "a flag" to help merchant keep track of their transactions. It doesn't affect a transaction in an y way.

[TJPride]

According to one of the mods, the recurring billing flag may determine whether the transaction requires first-time data verification or whether it's just a repeat and no verification is necessary:

https://support.authorize.net/authkb/index?page=content&id=A44&actp=LIST

"Setting the "Recurring Billing Transaction" flag to true when you submit a transaction to Authorize.Net actually does not directly affect the way that we process the transaction at all. It is dependent upon your processor how this flag will affect your transaction. One common example of how this affects transaction processing is that it may disable the Address Verification Service. Some processors assume that if the transaction is marked as recurring, you have already verified the customer fully and so the transaction verification status is marked as not applicable to the transaction."

Short version - if you're doing an initial charge via AIM, you want it not set to recurring, even if it's effectively part of a subscription. The subscription itself, on the other hand, can be safely set to recurring, since the AIM charge will verify that the card is working. When in doubt, just leave the recurring flag turned off.