CIM Payment Profile setup and transacting

[cherie]

 Hello friends, 

Hope my question makes some sense so you can give inputs to it and point me in the right direction.

We have decided to use CIM for member subscription over ARB as we have lot of business rlues related to billing that ARB don't support. We thought of creating the customer profile in CIM when someone registers on our website.

1.  When a customer pays for the first time - should the cc details be collected through CIM hosted forms?
2.  When the card details are submitted and passes the validation - would the payment profile be added against their profile and charged? 

I got a little confused about people using AIM and CIM both. 

Thank you in advance.

[RaynorC1emen7]

I know of 2 ways

1)CIM, You create the customer profile, then send your customer to the hosted CIM form to create the payment profile. Once it return, then you can use customer/payment profile ID to create a transaction.

2)Use the AIM createTransactionRequest to create the transaction, customer/payment profile.

http://developer.authorize.net/api/reference/