Monthly billing without user accounts

[george3380]

I'm trying to determine the best way to handle monthly billing. In my scenario, all users are guests and do not have accounts, but I do capture email.

I'm currently capturing payment using accept hosted. I had moderate success in creating the customer profile off that then creating the ARB using the transaction & profile. After testing, I ran into some errors that I had created too many profiles. I have a lot of forms and a user doing 10+ payments over time is feasible.

What is the best path forward? I see a guest profiletype briefly mentioned in the docs, but should I use this if I want monthly billing beyond 90 days? Or do I need to check if the email has an associated profile and guess which one to use? I do not care to store their profile ID indefinitely because they don't have accounts.

Thanks for your input.

[mmcguire · Accepted solution]

There is no restriction on the number of customer profiles, but there is on payment profiles and shipping address profiles under a single customer profile. I suspect that you may have one customer profile under which you have added many payment profiles. To check this you can view your profiles  in the Merchant Interface. 

To make unique customer profiles, the 3 data elements are checked against existing profiles. These data elements are:

merchantCustomerId

description

email

As long as the combination of these three elements are unique (even if some are blank), a new customer profile will be created and you should avoid this error.

You can delete profiles once you are done with them, if you don't wish to retain the data.

[george3380]

Yes, I meant payment profiles.

The information you sent about making unique customer profiles is super helpful. Perhaps I just need to drop a timestamp on the description field in createCustomerProfileFromTransactionRequest

I'll give it a go later today and report back. Thanks for your input!