CIM and Credential-on-File / Merchant Initiated Transaction mandates

[TomSwiss]

Hello. We receieved an e-mail from Authorize.net about "Credential-on-File (COF) and Merchant Initiated Transaction (MIT) mandates".

We're using CIM to do monthly billing of customers, and the e-mail says that "there are new API fields you may need to use, depending on your specific business, and just points us at the "API Reference Guide and the API Developer Guide" for more information.

When I try to look through the maze of "API Reference Guide" and "API Developer Guide" links (PLEASE, Authorize.net, bring back PDF versions of your docs) I can't even find CIM! I find "Customer Profiles", is that just a new and confusing branding for the same interface? Or is CIM no longer supported?

(Of course I understand that CIM creates a profile for a customer; but it's not clear the what the capitalized, proper nour "Customer Profiles" refers to relative to CIM.)

Trying to learn more, I found this page: https://developer.authorize.net/api/reference/features/card-on-file.html. But it also does not mention CIM, it's not clear what the relationship between "Card-On-File" and CIM is.

So if someone can explain the relationship between "CIM", "Customer Profiles", and "Card-On-File", and point me at some more specific information about these Credential-on-File and Merchant Initiated Transaction mandates, I'd be grateful. Thanks.

-Tom Swiss

[NexusSoftware]

Hello @TomSwiss,

If you are using the old Hosted CIM integration method, its status is End of Life and has been replaced by the Accept Customer methods. Which is where the "Customer Profile" terminology comes from.

A customer profile contains minimal information about the customer such as ID, description, and email address, but its main purpose is to link multiple payment and shipping profiles with a single customer entity.

API methods to manage customer profiles include:

• createCustomerProfile
• getCustomerProfile
• getCustomerProfileIds
• updateCustomerProfile
• createCustomerProfileFromTransaction

Payment profiles associated with a customerProfileId enable you to securely store sensitive customer payment information with Authorize.net in a PCI-compliant manner.

Distinguishing Hosted CIM from Accept Customer 

Both Hosted CIM and Accept Customer rely on a form token from the API, which you submit with an HTML form in the browser to a URL for the specific form you want to use. In most cases, you can switch from Hosted CIM to Accept Customer by changing the URL to which your form token is posted. Below are the URLs for Hosted CIM and for Accept Customer, to help you identify the changes you should make.

Deprecated Hosted CIM Form URL

https://secure.authorize.net/profile/_formName_ 

Current Accept Customer URLs

https://accept.authorize.net/customer/_formName_