Integrating CIM with Interspire Shopping Cart

[chamster]

Hello. I need to have access to the credit card numbers from customer orders. Interspire Shopping Cart doesn't store credit card numbers so if a customer wants to add something to an existing order we have to contact them and get their cc# again to do that. We are looking into using Authorize.net's Customer Information Manager but I don't know if it can be integrated with Interspire Shopping Cart.

Has anybody out there had any experience with integrating CIM with Interspire and can tell me if it's doable? Thanks! Bob

[TJPride]

Anything is doable. Whether it's doable by you is another matter entirely. Shopping carts are more complex than Authorize.net, so my advice would be to contact the makers of the cart and see if you can get them (or someone recommended by them) to help you integrate CIM. It'll be much easier than trying to find someone who knows Authorize.net and is capable of figuring out the shopping cart.

[chamster]

Thanks for the reply. Makes sense. I'm looking into it on the shopping cart end as well.

But I'd still like to hear from somebody who has integrated CIM with Interspire. Mostly hoping for a general idea of how it went and what approach was taken.

CIM seems like a good solution for the customer end of things, but my concern is that if the customer info is stored and maintained on Authorize.net, then what happens in the shopping cart's admin control panel where customer data is stored and associated with orders.

[TJPride]

You would probably still store everything on your end like you're doing now (minus credit card info, of course), it's just that that info would be mirrored on the Authorize.net side, and you'd be storing the profile and billing profile ID's as well on yours. The key question is, do you already have user logins or customer profiles built into the site / cart, in such a way that you can safely have people log in later and make a new order or update to their order? Or are site admins the only ones making updates to orders? Because it's all very well to have the profile ID's stored in your database, but if you can't match those up with returning customers, it doesn't really help anything.

[chamster]

I'm pretty sure admins are the only ones going in and updating orders. I'll have to check with my client on that to be sure.

So if the customer data is still getting stored on our end, then presumably the shopping cart's checkout process with its built-in forms (and processing scripts) would still be used.

This means we would not use CIM's forms for managing customer data.

In that case I'm guessing that the data from the shopping cart's form is somehow submitted both to the cart's database and to the CIM database.

And that would be accomplished by adding CIM code to the cart's processing scripts.

Does this sound correct?

Thanks!

[TJPride]

Yes. You'd use regular CIM instead of whatever you're using to charge or store information now, and you'd just (a) create a profile (b) charge that profile and (c) store the profile ID's as well as the non-credit card info you normally store with a completed order. Then if you want to add something later, you can just look up the profile ID associated with the order ID and go from there.

[chamster]

To clarify, would the customer be entering their profile information into a CIM form, with the entered data being stored in CIM as well as the cart's database, OR would they enter it into the cart's native form?

I'm trying to figure out if I'll be keeping the same checkout forms and adding CIM code to them, or replacing the cart's native forms with CIM forms and somehow getting the data from those forms into the cart's database.

I hope that makes sense. Thanks.

[TJPride]

The easiest integration with your existing system is probably going to be to collect the data on your end like you're doing now, then pass it to the regular (not hosted) CIM internally to create the profile. You'll essentially mirror the customer data to CIM, with the exception of the credit card or other payment info, which will only be in CIM.