Storing Customer Data

[JohnBoy]

Hello, newbie here.  I have a dumb question, and I apologize in advance if this is not the right place to ask it - please move it (or tell me how to) if it should reside elsewhere.

We have a customer who has subscribed to Auth.net's CIM service.  She says however that when customers are being directed to her payment page (hosted on AN) that the customer data is not being saved, so she has to go fetch it from the customer again if she wants to charge follow-up payments.

Is this something she can configure in her AN account?  I'm not sure what else we can do on our end besides send the customer to the AN page to pay... (?)

Any help appreciated.

Thanks,

John

[RaynorC1emen7]

Are you sure it is using CIM and not SIM/AIM/DPM?

Because CIM use the saved info to create CC transaction.

Have her check her merchant account and see if there is any CIM data.

[JohnBoy]

Thanks for the reply.

The source website is doing a simple form post of data to direct customers to the AN-hosted payment page.  (Is that what you mean?)

We pass customer indicative data, or at least the portion of it that we need, and these serve as defaults when the customer arrives at the AN-hosted payment page.  But they can of course override these.  I imagine they also choose what credit/debit card they want to use, and enter that information as well (16-digit number, expiration, and perhaps the 3-digit code on the back).  Address verification is configurable in customer's merchant account, is that right?

John

[RaynorC1emen7]

Sound like it is SIM and not CIM. Just by signup for CIM is not enough. Need programming change to support it.

The documentation

SIM

and

CIM

[JohnBoy]

Thanks.  But wow, really?  A merchant needs thousands of dollars of development work to support a simple customer storage feature?  That they are already paying $20 a month extra for?

Why can't AN store the customer info. automatically when customers pay through the simple AN-hosted form?

What if the merchant was manually entering CC transactions into their terminal?  Would AN store customer data then?

John

[RaynorC1emen7]

It doesn't take thousands of dollars, the sample code/documentation show how to do it already.

It not about saving the customer info, it mainly about saving the customer ID and customer payment profile ID on your end, so it can be access to create new transaction.

There is also the hosted CIM option as state in the documentation.

If merchant enter CC transaction thru the "Customer Information Manager tools"(not the standard Virtual Terminal), then yes it will be save.

[TJPride]

Agh. If you know what you're doing, it might take a few hundred dollars of time max to implement CIM. And Authorize.net DOES store customer info when you pay through the other API's - it's just not available to you through the API, for security reasons. You can, for instance, go to a transaction in your Authorize.net control panel and create a subscription from it that way. You can also access all the non-credit card details of a person by using the Transaction Details API with the transaction ID.

[JohnBoy]

Ah - maybe there's something wrong then.  We don't need (or want) to access any of the stored data through the API - we'd be happy in this case to just have AN store it, and then when the merchant logs into their account, they would be able to see the CC data and even use it to make further charges.  But this would be outside of the merchant's website.

Am I unnderstanding this correctly - if we're just posting to simple AN-hosted payment pages, then AN will store the customer CC data, but the merchant simply needs to access from a different interface than the standard Virtual Terminal?

If so, that could be very helpful until we can develop a more sophisticated solution.

Thanks for the help, I do appreciate it.

John

[TJPride]

You can not access credit card data directly through the API. Even CIM only gives you a profile ID that you can use to process further charges. The only way to get credit card data is to ticket from your account and ask Authorize.net to dump you a file, which I believe involves a one-time fee. If you want to do multiple unscheduled or variable charges automatically, your only choice is to integrate CIM.

[JohnBoy]

Ok, but you mentioned that she could go through her Auth.net control panel and create a subscription for a customer, right?  Can that be pulled from their previous transaction, that was created by the customer's original payment that they made by being directed to a simple AN-hosted payment page?

John