ARB and Silent Post query

[sunil_bhaker]

Hi,

      I have integrated Authorize.Net payment gateway in one of our web application with AIM and ARB. ARB is going to happen every month and using Silent Post we are collecting the required information that is posted by payment gateway.

Before implement the Silent Post  i send an email to Integrated department of Authorize.Net and got a response that "Silent Post will happened only if the transaction completed(approved) successfully".

But in our database we are getting the information based on Silent Post as below:-

1) Credit Card declined -  (Response Code : 3)   -  (Response Reason Code : 8)

2) Transaction declined  -  (Response Code : 2)   -  (Response Reason Code : 4)

3) Transaction declined  -  (Response Code : 2)   -  (Response Reason Code : 2)

These are the cases that we collect from our database based on the Silent Post occurances.

Its not happening according to the Integrated Department of Authorize.Net said or please correct me if i am wrong.

Now we need to understand the cases that when  the Silent Post will occur and when it will not. So that we can inform the user about the subscription (Suspended/Terminated) and force them to update the credit card information at the time of logged-in.

In the last of this post please find the message that we got from development department of Authorize.Net.

Please suggest.

Thanks.

Message from Developer Department:

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

If a credit card on file within an ARB subscription has expired, a transaction will not process thus you will not receive a Silent Post response, as you only receive Silent Post responses to transactions that process through your account.
 
In order to be notified about expired credit cards, please enable the ARB email notifications within your account. Information about the email notifications available to you can be found within the ARB API Implementation Guide within the section that discusses transaction responses. I believe this section begins on page 17.
 
If an ARB subscription transaction is processed, but fails due to a decline, you will receive a Silent Post response as soon as the transaction has processed through our payment gateway. If you plan on utilizing the Silent Post response to make updates to the subscription(s), or cancel them due to failed billing attempts, it is important that you do not make any immediately updates to the subscription upon receipt of the Silent Post response. The reason for this is that, as stated above, the Silent Post response is sent to you as soon as the transaction processes, however the update to the subscription in our system does not occur immediately. Any update/cancellation that you may make to a subscription, prior to our update of the subscription, will be overwritten by ours. We recommend that you use the Silent Post URL as a transaction response dump into a database or file and then run a job later in the day to make any adjustments to your ARB subscriptions programmatically.
 
Another important factor that you should be aware of is that our system only allows your Silent Post URL 2 seconds to accept the form POST we send, which is another reason why you should not script additional processes to take place automatically based on the response(s) you receive.
 
Also, ARB subscriptions that fail will never be re-tried. If you need to bill your customer for failed payments you will need to either adjust the ARB subscription to accommodate for the missed payment or submit a transaction manually or via the AIM connection method. The same is true for any updates that occur within a subscription. We will not automatically re-send an authorization request when you update the subscription with new information. Subscription transactions will only process on the dates for which they are scheduled.
 
Let me know if you have any additional questions.
 
Regards,
_______________________________________
Elaine Mitchell |  Integration Specialist
CyberSource | Authorize.Net Small Business Unit
10800 NE 8th St | Suite 600 | Bellevue, WA 98004
emitchell@cybersource.com | http://www.authorize.net

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

[stymiee]

I can confirm that silent post will also post responses for declined transactions as well as approved ones. 

[sunil_bhaker]

Hi,

     Could you please define all the scenarios where the Silent Post will post response and where it is not?

Thanks.

[stymiee]

Silent post will be incurred for successful AIM and CIM transactions and all ARB transactions (this includes declines).

[itdevworks]

As an addendum to stymiee's response, don't forget the caveat with respect to expired credit cards.  Quoting from the text pasted in to your original post above (with some highlighting):

"If a credit card on file within an ARB subscription has expired, a transaction will not process thus you will not receive a Silent Post response, as you only receive Silent Post responses to transactions that process through your account.
 
In order to be notified about expired credit cards, please enable the ARB email notifications within your account. Information about the email notifications available to you can be found within the ARB API Implementation Guide within the section that discusses transaction responses. I believe this section begins on page 17."

[dternan]

So, as stated above, we will not recieve a notification through the silent post on expired credit cards.  The only way to know about this is to recieve an email. 

My questions is, how are we supposed to handle this in an automated fashion? 

Reading an email indicates to me that it has to be done manually.  If you have thousands of users, handling this manually is not a good option. 

Are we expected to store the expiration date in our DB so that we can cancel these?  Not a good option either.

Let me know if anyone has found a solution to this problem. 

Thanks!

[stymiee]

It's possible to programmatically receive and process email. I'm sure there are plenty of tutorials online for this in the language of your choice. I know for PHP this isn't difficult to do.

[mfredin]

dternan, 

I'm also trying to figure out a way to automate non silent post transactions due to expired credit cards.  

Have you had any luck figuring something out here?

Thanks!