rocknbil - 10:38 am on Jul 27, 2007 (gmt 0)

I've worked with both Authorize.net and NetBilling on recurring billing for customers but have encountered a serious shortcoming with both. I would like to expand this question into one that has been recurring lately:

jwolthuis, to your knowledge does PayFlow Pro send a notification of the recurring billing back to the website to automate updates?

Scenario:
1. Site owner offers automatic recurring billing for memberships (opted in by the customer of course.)

2. It would be easy to run a cron job from the website to check customer expirations and initiate a charge through the processor, but this would mean the cron job must get the CC info from "somewhere" - that somewhere being stored in a database on the web server. The customer wisely does not wish to store CC information on the website but rather allow the processor to manage it.

3. Therefore a "usable" recurrent billing system should be able to initiate the recurrent credit card charge and post a notification to a website url (not just send an email) to update the customer's membership.

All of the CC processors I have worked with are not able to do this, for whatever reason. I'm not sure if payPal can do this, but the model would be similar to payPal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) methods. A secure string is posted to a recipient program or script on the website, which parses the input and updates the database.

When someone makes a purchase by eCheck through payPal, the IPN is not sent until several days later when the eCheck clears. It seems to me the same concepts should apply to recurrent billing.

This is relevant to the original question in that yes, Authorize.net, Netbilling, and PayFlow Pro manage recurrent billing, but if they doesn't post back to a website it means the site owner must manually update their database, which renders recurrent billing worthless for most automated maintenance.

Correct?