The full announcement can be seen here.
I was working on a project for a client recently that involved Authorize.net CIM integration. The client is a member organization and they bill all of their members once-per-year on the same day. With approximately 4,000 members, this means they needed to make sure that credit cards and bank accounts had not expired, been closed, or anything else which would prevent successful billing since the previous billing cycle the year before. To accomplish this, they planned to use the validateCustomerPaymentProfileRequest feature of the CIM service. They asked me how the validation worked and if it would actually charge anything against the cards. I had pondered this question in the past, but I had never actually done the legwork to figure it out. Now I had a client paying me for it, so I used what for me has been the quickest method of getting to Authorize.net support, the Live Chat feature available from the link at the top of the page when you log in to your Authorize.net account. What follows is the transcript of that chat:
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You have been connected to Travis A.
Travis A: Hello David! How can I help you today?
Me: Wow. that was fast.
Me: I have (hopefully) a quick question regarding the Customer Information Manager (CIM) service…
Me: Is this something you can help with?
Travis A: of course
Me: When making a validateCustomerPaymentProfileRequest, as I understand it, the PaymentProfile (be it credit card or bank account) is charged $.01 to validate that the account info is valid, and then the charge is removed. How is this accomplished? Does it Authorize but not Capture, Authorize and Capture, but then Void it, or something else?
Travis A: It is an Authorize Only transaction, and then it voids the transactions.
Me: Therefore I presume that there is no transaction fees incurred, correct?
Travis A: There is the basic transaction fee for the auth only, which is $0.10
Me: Hmmm… so it will cost $100 for every 1000 payment profiles validated.
Travis A: Correct.
Me: Okay. that’s what I needed to know. Thank you for your assistance.
Travis A: Thanks for dropping by, David! Please feel free to contact us again with further questions. If you would like a copy of this session for reference, please click on the “Print” icon.
Me: Okay. thanks. [signing-off]
Yowza! So it is going to cost my client roughly $400 just to validate that the payment profiles they have are valid. This was a bit of a surprise to me. In the end, the client just submitted the payments and dealt with the rejections afterwards since it was cheaper than paying the 10-cents for all of the valid payment profiles (which was, of course, the vast majority of them).
So if you find yourself batch validating a large number of payment profiles on Authorize.net’s CIM service, you should know that you pay a per-transaction charge for each PaymentProfile validated via the validateCustomerPaymentProfileRequest method or if the validationMode element is set to liveMode for createCustomerProfileRequest or createCustomerPaymentProfileRequest.
