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. 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’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, 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?
I’m working on the same thing right now. Has anyone integrated the
Automatic Recurring Billing into their rails application? Is there an
easy way to do it?
I’m working on the same thing right now. Has anyone integrated the
Automatic Recurring Billing into their rails application? Is there an
easy way to do it?
Joe,
I wrote a ruby library for interacting with the recurring billing API
for TrustCommerce (www.trustcommerce.com). You could write one for
the ARB API. It’s really not that hard. Take a look at http://trustcommerce.rubyforge.org for the code. Maybe you can use it
as a template for building an ARB one…
I’m fine with the customer being billed on, say, the first of the month
each month. I just want to have the ability to update the subscription
or cancel it, and I think I can do that with Automatic Recurring Billing
from Authorize.net. They provide some Ruby samples, so hopefully I can
work off of that.
If anyone has experience using ARB from Authorize.net please post here.
I’m fine with the customer being billed on, say, the first of the month
each month. I just want to have the ability to update the subscription
or cancel it, and I think I can do that with Automatic Recurring Billing
from Authorize.net. They provide some Ruby samples, so hopefully I can
work off of that.
If anyone has experience using ARB from Authorize.net please post here.
Those basic subscription services are fine, except there’s no way to
tell when a payment fails. You just have to watch the emails and
close accounts manually, or write something to parse the returned
emails. I’d love it if they had something similar to Paypal IPN.
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?
I worked with these issues about a month ago, only with PayPal Payflow
Pro.
My conclusion was that the regular recurring billing wouldn’t work for
my client, for reasons similar to yours.
However, Payflow Pro supports performing transactions by reference to a
previous transaction. So we were able to accomplish our goal (at least
in testing; the project isn’t live yet:-) by saving the transaction
reference from the original transaction (i.e., the one made with the CC
number etc.).
This way, we can do transactions for arbitrary amounts, at arbitrary
times, without the original CC information.
–Al Evans
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