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To ensure that a customer has entered a valid Payment Method, before accepting it for use to pay AutoBills, turn on payment method validation by setting the validateForFuturePayment (AutoBill.update) or validate (PaymentMethod.update) flag to true.
  • If the billing is scheduled for today, Subscribe authorizes the full amount immediately. In the event of a failure, Subscribe responds according to the immediateAuthFailurePolicy The immediateAuthFailurePolicy options are as follows:
    • doNotSaveAutoBill: (Default) deletes the AutoBill without saving it.
    • putAutoBillInRetryCycle: Creates AutoBill and retries the authorizaton.
    • putAutoBillInRetryCycleIfPaymentMethodIsValid (recommended)
  • If the billing is scheduled for a future date, the validateForFuturePayment flag is then used to determine whether we should do a minimal authorization (0/0/1) immediately.
However, If you have already validated the payment method (for example, if you are importing and creating AutoBill objects from previously successful transactions, or if you have successfully performed a real-time transaction before creating the AutoBill object), consider turning validation off, to reduce the number of calls you make to the processor. Note: (CVN is Vindicia’s generic term for credit-card security code, usually located on the back of the card. Some credit-card companies refer to it as the CVV, CVV2, CVC2, CCID, among other things.) Validation generates and sends to the payment processor one of three types of transactions:
  • **0Authorization:∗∗Assumingthatthepaymentprocessorsupports0 Authorization:** Assuming that the payment processor supports 0 authorization, if the creation of an AutoBill object does not result in an immediate billing, as in the case of a free trial period, or if the AutoBill does not start immediately, Subscribe creates a real-time validation with a zero amount, and sends it to the payment processor.
  • **1Authorization:∗∗Ifthepaymentprocessordoesnotsupport1 Authorization:** If the payment processor does not support 0 authorization, and if the creation of an AutoBill object does not result in an immediate billing, or if the AutoBill object does not start immediately, Subscribe creates a real-time transaction with a 1.00 amount and sets the currency to the customer’s currency (for example, US$1.00 if USD, or €1.00 if EUR is the currency associated with the Account object) and sends it to the payment processor. Subscribe authorizes this transaction instantly with your payment processor, but does not mark the transaction for capture, so the customer is not charged for it.
  • Authorization for the full amount of the first billing cycle: Using a configuration setting, you can enable Subscribe to perform a real-time AuthCapture operation for the full amount of the initial billing cycle. This operation occurs only if the AutoBill object is set to start immediately, that is, it does not offer any initial free trial period or is not scheduled to start today. Instead of performing a validation (for 0or0 or 1) and then an AuthCapture operation for the full amount due later, Subscribe simply performs AuthCapture, saving you the cost of the validation.
If payment authorization fails on the attempted validation method, Subscribe may not create the AutoBill object (if that was the option to immediateAuthFailurePolicy you chose), in which case you might request a different payment from the customer. Subscribe also validates other payment methods, such as ECP, if they are supported by the payment processor. For example, with Chase Paymentech, Subscribe validates ECP-based payment methods by running initial checks on the related bank routing numbers and account numbers. Part of this check verifies whether the routing number belongs to a known bank, and if the account number is blacklisted in the Chase Paymentech database. For more information, see the TransactionStatus Subobject in the Subscribe API Guide, and Section 4.1: AutoBill Data Members in theSubscribe API Guide.   Parent topic:Creating AutoBills