ARB subscription payments

[rroyter]

Hi,

I wanted to clarify a few things about the ARB option.

1. There is no other way to get the transactions except by Silent Post and email within ARB?

2. Can I get these transactions via the Transactions Details API?

Thanks,

Roman

[TJPride]

1) If by silent post you mean the callback page, then yes. Your callback page will need to store the transaction ID's, ideally.  Though you can also get a list of settled transactions via the transaction details API by accessing batches, then transactions, then transaction details - so long as you have a customer ID in each transaction.

2) Yes, using the transaction ID's. The transaction data is also passed to the callback page in the form of a bunch of $_POST variables - you can log $_POST to a text file using the following to get an idea of what the data looks like:

$logfile = "path to log file";
$handle = fopen($logfile, 'a');
fwrite($handle, print_r($_POST, true));

[rroyter]

I see. So Customer ID is what I generate in the ARBCreateSubscription call, or do I need to create that entry with Authorize API first?

[TJPride]

Custotmer ID would be something generated by your own database and passed as one of the values to Authorize.net, so when the callback gets triggered on a successful charge, the callback page then knows which of your customers to assign it to in your database. Otherwise, how does your system know who's paid up to date?

[rroyter]

Well, to avoid PCI compliance headache I actually do not want to save the billing info on my server at all and let the ARB figure out whom to charge. But I see now, that I can just generate an ID for a customer and it should be enough to get access to payments.

[TJPride]

You don't have to store anything on your side except date and amount of charge (if you want to provide your users with a billing history), and subscription ID (if you want the ability to update the billing info later). I suppose if you have the subscription ID, there's probably even a way to access the charge information directly, though I prefer to have at least a summary in my db so I can run statistics without requesting a bunch of records from Authorize.net.