How do you folks handle posting re-occurring payments to your billing system?

Currently I have a Card Service merchant account and use the Authorize.Net gateway. I do not do re-occurring billing. I am moving to CDG commerce and will probably switch to their EPN gateway.

After the switch I want to activate re-occurring billing. It is my understanding that neither Authorize.Net nor EPN do a post back when they automatically process a re-occurring payment. This creates a problem for me in that I’ll have to manually download a payment transaction file each night and process the re-occurring payments. All in all this seems more labor intensive than just having my customers log-in to their billing panel and make a one-off payment. With both processors, one-off payments post back to my billing system. Using the hash-key I’m assured that the payment is legitimate, and can even log failed payment attempts to assist a customer when a payment doesn’t go through. We do an audit once a month (compare posts to our system against transactions logged in the gateway) and so far haven’t found a discrepancy in over four years.

Bob

Perhaps cdgcommerce has another gateway option that offers recurring billing for you.
Its not an uncommon option to offer vendors unless perhaps there are currency changing issues.

Hi Bob,

iTransact has the ability to post-back a recurring transaction to a script on the merchant side. So that is one possible option.

Just FYI - I'm also talking with eProcessingNetwork about having a post-back capability added into their gateway as well. They are usually pretty quick to enhance their system whenever a need arises so that could be a reality in the near future.

With either system, however, there is no need to do any kind of a manual step. The recurring billing systems for both gateways will handle the automated re-billing.

The nicety of having a post-back, of course, is that you can have real-time database updates made over on your side with the result of each transaction... as opposed to just getting an e-mail on the approved (or declined) recurring billings.

Let me know if that makes sense or if I can help clarify further on either system. Thanks!