Archive for February, 2025

One of the biggest misconceptions out there right now is that Authorize.Net is a payment processor. Often times I will hear or read about someone who is looking for a new payment processor and a common answer is, “try Paypal or Authorize.Net”. While I am sure Authorize.Net is thrilled that they are so commonly considered by merchants as a payment solution, unfortunately by itself their product is useless.

What most people do not seem to understand is exactly what Authorize.Net offers. Authorize.Net primary service is their payment gateway. A payment gateway connects a merchant’s website (usually through their shopping cart) to their merchant account. The payment gateway takes the transaction information, passes it on to the processing bank. It then receives the results of that transaction and presents it back to the originating website so it may react accordingly. Basically, it performs the same function as a credit card terminal does in a retail store.

What is important to note about this is scenario is that without the merchant account on the other end, the payment gateway is useless. Without someone to send the transaction to the payment gateway cannot function as by definition the gateway serves to connect the website to the merchant account. Having no merchant account means an incomplete

An important reason why this is important to know is some merchants may sign up for an Authorize.Net account thinking they are getting everything they need to process credit cards online. In reality they are missing the most important piece and have even more fees in store for their business. This might not be the best option for their business especially if they will be a low volume business.

So, when you see someone recommending Authorize.Net as a payment processor, keep in mind they are only a tool for processing payments. They are not the ones actually processing the payment. That is the role of the merchant account.

Technorati Tags: Authorize.Net, payment gateway, merchant account, process credit cards

Today Authorize.Net released their API for their recurring billing feature of their payment gateway. This feature has been eagerly awaited by businesses who wish to automate the process of establishing recurring billing accounts without having to manually set up each account or, even more importantly, did not want to store credit card information of their customers until they had an opportunity to establish their recurring billing account.

Examples of businesses you could take advantage of this are:

• Webhosting
• Subscription based websites

Naturally we wasted no time and created our own class to access their API. Here is an example of how to use this class to create a recurring billing account. It should be noted that this class defaults to monthly recurring billing that starts one month from when the recurring billing account is created and will run for three years. You can change this by passing different values to the class before creating the account.


try
{
require_once("AuthnetARB.class.php");

$arb = new AuthnetARB();
$arb -> setParameter(’amount’, 1.00);
$arb -> setParameter(’refId’, 1242);
$arb -> setParameter(’cardNumber’, ‘5424000000000015′);
$arb -> setParameter(’expirationDate’, ‘ 2026 -05′);
$arb -> setParameter(’firstName’, ‘Jim’);
$arb -> setParameter(’lastName’, ‘Conners’);
$arb -> setParameter(’subscrName’, ‘Test Account’);
$arb -> createAccount();

echo $arb -> getResponse();
}
catch (AuthnetARBException $e)
{
$debug = $e->getTrace();
die(”Exception occurred: ” . $e->getMessage() . “. File: ” .
$debug[0][’file’] . ” on line ” . $debug[0][’line’]);
}


Hopefully this is enough to get you started in accessing the Authorize.Net Recurring Billing API. You can be sure an article will follow that will go into further detail about using this feature and API.

You can download the PDF of their integration guide from your control panel.

You can download a beta version of our Authorize.Net Recurring Billing Class here. It is written in PHP 5 but can easily be converted to PHP 4.

Technorati Tags: Authorize.Net, payment gateway, recurring billing, PHP 5, PHP 4, subscriptions, credit card