[Update: 2009-11-10 @ 2:30 PM PST: It seems that as soon as I put this out Michelle C. from Authorize.net officially announced this feature on the Developer Community Forums. It also notes that this is phase one of a two-phase rollout, so there is more functionality to come.]
Those folks over at Authorize.net are so humble. Whenever they come out with something new, they don’t make a big splash and boast to the world what a great thing they have done. Instead they just put it out there and let us discover the fruits of their labor on our own.
For example, when the Customer Information Manager (CIM) service was first released, there was no method to discover all of the customer profiles you created on the service. The only way to retrieve a customer profile was to use the customerProfileId field assigned when you created the profile. This was a major problem in the API since, if you were to lose the customerProfileId, you could not retrieve the profile record for that id. Yet if you tried to recreate it, you might get a “Duplicate profile” error. Then, in January of this year (2009), they silently released an update to the CIM service that not only included the new getCustomerProfileIdsRequest method, but also modified the “duplicate profile” error response XML to include the id of the duplicate it found. I never saw any announcement of this anywhere. I only found it because I regularly download the CIM XML Implementation Guide to see if the documentation has been updated.
CIM User Interface
Now they have done it again (those wascally wabbits!), only this time they released something much bigger. One of the biggest problems CIM has faced? When merchants call up Authorize.net to sign up for CIM, they discover they cannot do anything with it until they hire a programmer and pay hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars to integrate CIM with their website or application. This is clearly a show-stopper for many potential customers.
Like me, anyone that has used CIM much at all has likely been expecting Authorize.net to build a user interface over CIM, much like they have for their Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) service. I actually recently had this confirmed by inside sources at Authorize.net. But didn’t know when it would come out, and I expected them to make a big splash out of it.
Just a Little Hint
Instead, as I was reading the Authorize.net developer community forums yesterday, I came across this post where one of the forum moderators casually said:
“[…]which you can now do by clicking Customer Information Manager from within the Merchant Interface. From the main CIM page, you can click Add Profile and enter the customer’s payment and shipping information.”
I did a double-take. Did she just casually mention that there is major new functionality added to the merchant interface for Authorize.net accounts with CIM enabled? I read it again. Yes, indeed she did. So I immediately logged in to my Test account (since my live account has no need for CIM) and, lo and behold, there it was (note that, being my test account, the data in the image does not reflect what a live account would look like, with real IDs and emails).
(click image for full-sized picture)
I find the implementation as I expected it to be. It allows you to perform pretty much all of the actions that the CIM API supports, except, interestingly enough, actually submit a payment transaction request. That seems like a pretty major hole that will be a common request heard over at Authorize.net. Otherwise, it looks pretty good on a first glance.
Congrats Are In Order
But I am still befuddled by their silence on this release. I can kind of understand (although I don’t necessarily agree with) not announcing the addition of the getCustomerProfileIdsRequest method, but this is pretty major, and there isn’t even a blurb in the “Announcements” section when you log in to your live Authorize.net account. The most recent addition there is from 10/13/09 titled, “Fraudulent Sites and Phishing Scams”. Not a peep about the brand spanking new CIM user interface pages.
Still, many will be happy to discover this new feature. In fact, until they add the ability to submit transactions, it is possible that those who stand to gain the most benefit are the developers themselves because we finally have a way of verifying what information is in CIM without having to write a bunch of code to do it. I know I certainly will.
Most of all, though, I want to congragulate Authorize.net on this release, and also thank them for listening to their customers and responding, thus making our lives easier.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
We’re currently making use of your CIM Library and the Authorize.net CIM user interface and are very pleased with the power they both provide. Thank you for letting us focus on writing our code at an object level and not having to become experts with the inner workings of Authorize.net!
Thank you so much for the comments. A lot of hours went in to the design and construction of it. We even took a major turn partway through and tossed out a bunch of code because we realized the model we were exposing wasn’t intuitive and predictable enough. We have an update coming out any day which fixes some issues when trying to make Refund or Void requests.
Dear Author drp.itdevworks.com !
I confirm. I join told all above. Let’s discuss this question. Here or in PM.
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