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Authorize.Net Launches Recurring Billing API

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’, ‘ 2024 -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 PDFPDF 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.

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11 Responses to “Authorize.Net Launches Recurring Billing API”

  1. Nhoc Quay

    Awesome. This would help a lot! Thanks for the update. I’m just curious though, how come there’s nothing on the authorize.net site or the developer section? Maybe they’ll updating it.

  2. Alexis Bellido

    Hello Jim, thanks a lot for sharing the good news.

    I have the same question, why there’s no official word of Authorize.net yet?

    Is this API already working for people with ARB enabled accounts or we have to ask for it?

    Thanks!

  3. Jim Conners

    I followed up with Authorize.Net and it seems at the last second they held off a bit. At this point it can go live at any minute. I wrote this blog post last night and scheduled it to publish when it was originally set to launch (while I was sleeping) so it looks like I jumped the gun a bit but since they will be launching it momentarily I see no harm in leaving this up.

    And the API will be available to all merchants who have activated the recurring billing module for their account. It uses the same API keys as their AIM API. Once it goes live you will see a link to get the documentation in your control panel.

  4. Alexis Bellido

    Cool! I’ll keep an eye on my control panel.

    Thanks!

  5. Dylan Tynan

    I have been able to put through some test ARB subscriptions & that seems to work fine. However, I am still waiting on authorize.net to get back to me with details on how I’m supposed to find out what xactions fail or succeed months down the road. They’re telling me I should get an email (though, really, a login-protected xml results page would be much better in my opinion than a plain-text email flying over the net…even if it’s just subscription # and result code, why even bring email into it?). Anyway, they’ve been “checking on this” for a week or so …. Jim, have you heard anything on how this is supposed to work? At some point some future billing is going to fail & I’d like to handle it programmatically…..

    Dylan

  6. Alexis Bellido

    Hi, I’ve just finished making some changes so that the class works with both PHP 5 and PHP 4.

    Get the Authorize.net ARB class for PHP 4 and 5 from my site and let me know how it works.

    Thanks for sharing the original code Jim.

    Cheers!

  7. Dan Grossman

    Oh my god. Why didn’t anybody tell me about this (including Authorizenet). I was on the verge of switching gateways to get a recurring billing API and now I find out Authorizenet has had one for a month.

  8. Dan Grossman : Whoa. Authorize.net has a recurring billing API?

    […] I read a post by stymiee, one of my favorite members and another great contributor to the forums there, and noticed his signature: Authorize.Net releases their Recurring Billing API - GET THE CODE. I was amazed. Authorize.net had created a recurring billing API and not even mentioned it in the announcements list that shows up whenever I log in to my account there. […]

  9. Arnab

    Hello
    I am facing a problem regarding ARB payment method in authorize.net, Here i want to update my database after each payment of each ARB subscribed user and it need to be done silently . can you please tell me whether silent post will work here or not, if not is there any other way to do the same?

  10. Jim Conners

    There is no way to do this as Authnet will not contact you unless there is a problem. And then it is only by email. You can assume a payment is successful unless you get an email and if you are a decent programmer you can intercept that email with a programming language and have it mark the payment as not processed in your DB.

  11. rogo

    Hi,

    Is there anyone who managed to make a successful ARB API call using SOAP? For us all SOAP requests returns response with error “E00001: An error occurred during processing. Please try again”

    When XML is used for request a subscription is created ok, but not with SOAP request.

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