Merchant Account Blog

As we saw in our previous posts Building a Recurring Billing System and Building a Recurring Billing System Part 2: Storing Information, and Building a Recurring Billing System Part 3: Updating the Credit Card we can combine the Authorize.Net ARB API to build a powerful subscription system. In part three we discussed how we would update a customer’s credit card through our own interface. In this part we will create a need to use the functionality discussed in our last post.

The Authorize.Net ARB system allows for us to establish subscriptions that will not expire for up to three years. However, it is possible a customer’s credit card will expire before their subscription is complete. Unfortunately Authorize.Net will not inform us of this until after the credit card has been declined. So our system will need to track expiring credit cards for us.

Fortunately this is easy to do and can be completely automated to boot. In part two we discussed what information we wanted to store. One piece of information we decided to store was the expiration date of the customer’s credit card. This was done specifically so we could keep track of expiring credit cards. How we use it is very straight forward. We will write a cron job that looks for credit cards that within the next 30 days. If we find any we will send those customers an email letting them about the impending expiration of their credit card and invite them to use the page we created in part three to update their credit card information. This is nice because it is all automated!

Sample code this might look like this:


$link = mysql_connect('mysql_host', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password')
or die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());

mysql_select_db('my_database') or die('Could not select database');

$query = 'SELECT * FROM my_table';

$result = mysql_query($query) or die('Query failed: ' . mysql_error());

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC))
{
$to = $row['email_address'];
$subject = "Update your subscription!";
$body = "Time to update your subscription.
Go to http://www.domain.com/update.php.";
mail($to, $subject, $body);
}

mysql_free_result($result);

mysql_close($link);


So far we have created a way for customers to update their subscription and an automated tool to inform them of the expiration of their credit card that invites them to use this tool. Next we will have to deal with the three year limit of the Authorize.Net ARB system.

Technorati Tags: Authorize.Net, payment gateway, recurring billing

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2023 at 8:00 am and is filed under Payment Gateways, Programmers Toolbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.