# Storing customer CC on gateway **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [March 9, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storing-customer-cc-on-gateway/88318 "2007-03-09T17:37:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/db5fbb/32.png) [@jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jonlog)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storing-customer-cc-on-gateway/88318/1 "2007-03-09T17:37:01Z")
I posted this late yesterday afternoon to no response, so I figured I’d try once more to get the morning people’s attention. I’m working on setting up the credit card processing part of a rails app for my company and running into some issues. I’m currently working with the ActiveMerchant plugin and connecting to our account at [Authorize.net](http://Authorize.net). Everything’s been relatively easy to setup, until I got to the recurring billing part. The problems I’m finding are… A. ActiveMerchant doesn’t appear (yet?) to support [Authorize.net](http://Authorize.net)’s _new_ Automatic Recurring Billing (ARB) API. B. ARB doesn’t appear to directly notify our application about what charges failed or succeeded, instead sending a daily email that a person would have to read and then manually go take appropriate actions on user accounts, which completely surprises me. I wrote a recurring billing interface to Paypal in Perl over two years ago, and this was a standard part of the interface for them all the way back then. C. ARB doesn’t allow the kind of control we need for deciding when and how much to charge people. ARB wants us to setup a schedule to charge card X Y times at Z frequency. However, our system would be a little more akin to allowing users to use a card already on file for future purchases without having to re-enter the card. The amounts and frequencies are going to change a lot. We don’t want to store the card info on our sever, but would rather store in on the gateway and just send them a key referencing the previously used card and tell them to, “charge that one again for this new amount, and respond with the status.” Has anybody else run into any of these issues, and if so, how did you deal with it. We’re not married to ActiveMerchant or [Authorize.net](http://Authorize.net), so if there are alternatives to either/both that would allow the kind of control we need, I’d love to hear about them. To summarize, we need to charge irregular amounts at irregular intervals to a specific card keyed to a specific customer _without_ storing the credit card info on our server _or_ requiring the customer to re-enter their card info every time, and find out immediately (_not_ via email) if the charge succeeded or failed. Pipe dream? ---
**Author:** ![jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/db5fbb/32.png) [@jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jonlog)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2007, 5:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storing-customer-cc-on-gateway/88318/2 "2007-03-09T17:45:07Z")
Hi Jon, I don’t have any experience yet with this stuff, but it’s getting very close to the top of my list so I’ll be interested in how things go for you. The recurring-but-with-different-amounts issue looms especially large for me. I hope you get some responses from folks with actual experience. One thing that might help is to re-post with one issue per. The subject here is representative for only part of your post. Best regards, Bill ---
**Author:** ![jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/db5fbb/32.png) [@jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jonlog)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2007, 11:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storing-customer-cc-on-gateway/88318/3 "2007-03-09T23:50:28Z")
Thanks for the info Zack. It looks like TC might be flexible enough to do what we need. I sent an email to TC sales yesterday (still no reply) to find out whether or not they supported what we needed to do as well as if they work with WellsFargo. It seems that our financial dept is joined at the hip to WF, so unless TC works with WF, then that probably won’t be an option. TC claims, " We work with almost every bank in the US, so chances are your bank is supported.", but WF specifically directed us to [A.net](http://A.net), so … I don’t know. I would guess that TC works fine with WF, but with 24 hours gone by with still no reply from TC, I’m having my doubts. ---
**Author:** ![jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/db5fbb/32.png) [@jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jonlog)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2007, 12:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storing-customer-cc-on-gateway/88318/4 "2007-03-10T00:10:29Z")
On 3/9/07, Jon G. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > I would guess that TC works fine with WF, but with 24 hours gone by with > still no reply from TC, I’m having my doubts. Jon, Interesting. I had a really bad experience with a salesman there. Almost made me go somewhere else. But the price and solid API kept me in the game. Ever since becoming a customer I have been very satisfied with the responsiveness of customer support on technical and billing questions. I would call up and request a test account with Citadel support (their buzzword for subscription billing support). Then you can play around a bit to get a feel of the product. The technical docs you will have access to as part of the test account will let you explore the full API and then you should be able to properly evaluate the service. It has worked very well for us (we use BofA). Hope this helps. – Zack C. [http://depixelate.com](http://depixelate.com) ---
**Author:** ![jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/db5fbb/32.png) [@jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jonlog)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2007, 12:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storing-customer-cc-on-gateway/88318/5 "2007-03-10T00:40:32Z")
Thanks again Zack. Per your suggestion I called instead of waiting for an email response, and got an answer right away, which unfortunately was _not_ a simple yes or no. uggh. The person I talked to is setting up a test account for us with Citadel though, so once I’ve confirmed that we can do what we need, I’ll start jumping through the other hoops for WF. TFSMIF. Have a great weekend. ---
**Author:** ![jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/db5fbb/32.png) [@jonlog](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jonlog)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2007, 9:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storing-customer-cc-on-gateway/88318/6 "2007-03-09T21:29:09Z")
On 3/9/07, Jon G. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > A. ActiveMerchant doesn’t appear (yet?) to support [Authorize.net](http://Authorize.net)’s _new_ > how much to charge people. ARB wants us to setup a schedule to charge > if there are alternatives to either/both that would allow the kind of > control we need, I’d love to hear about them. > > To summarize, we need to charge irregular amounts at irregular intervals > to a specific card keyed to a specific customer _without_ storing the > credit card info on our server _or_ requiring the customer to re-enter > their card info every time, and find out immediately (_not_ via email) > if the charge succeeded or failed. Pipe dream? Jon, You might want to check out TrustCommerce ([www.trustcommerce.com](http://www.trustcommerce.com)). They will store the credit card info and then you can have them bill the same amount on a recurring basis or tell TC the amount to charge every month. It’s very flexible and well documented. Also, I wrote a gem that provides a nice interface to the TC subscription model: [http://trustcommerce.rubyforge.org](http://trustcommerce.rubyforge.org) Hope this helps. – Zack C. [http://depixelate.com](http://depixelate.com)