How Do I Handle Recurring Payments?
If you are wanting to offer recurring donations through RaiseDonors, make sure your account at Authorize.net has the "Automated Recurring Billing" (ARB) feature enabled.
Step 1: In most cases you can log into your Merchant Interface account at account.authorize.net and then go to Tools > Recurring Billing. If you (the merchant) haven't signed up for ARB yet, you will see a screen asking you to accept the ARB terms of service to activate ARB.
Step 2: Once you have enabled ARB in Authorize.net, you need to tell RaiseDonors that ARB is enabled. You can do this by navigating within RaiseDonors to Account Settings > Payment Providers. From there, click on the appropriate Authorize.net merchant account and then on the Edit button by Recurring Donations.
- In the Recurring Payments section, toggle to activate "Recurring donations". Donors will now be able to make their gift recurring.
- In the Recurring Payments section, toggle to activate "Import scheduled recurring donations". RaiseDonors will import all of the future transactions that occur related to the recurring donation.
- Once you've activated step 2, you'll get an additional option. Toggle to activate "Import pre-existing recurring donations". This will allow RaiseDonors to recognize and 'link' any existing schedules that were made outside of RaiseDonors. The gateway doesn't capture the attribution data so RaiseDonors needs to know where to attribute these unique donations. And because all donations are required to be assigned to a Project, this field MUST be identified for your integration to succeed.
Step 3: Now that you have successfully enabled recurring features in Authorize.net and in RaiseDonors, you need to update any of your existing donation pages in RaiseDonors to use newly enabled feature. Click on "Pages" from the top navigation and edit any of your pages. In the page editor click the "setup" tab and look for the Payment Setup section. Now you have the ability to specify One-time and/or recurring options for this giving page. You'll need to make your choices and save.
Step 4:It's important to note that you must complete this step to configure the Silent Post URL if you desire to have recurring donations from Authorize.net appear inside RaiseDonors. Failure to complete this step will block Authorize.net from notifying RaiseDonors of any future recurring donations.
After you complete this step, when a recurring transaction at Authorize.net is charged, it will notify RaiseDonors and you will see each iteration of the recurring transaction inside RaiseDonors.
Step 5: You will also need to ensure CIM (Customer information manager) services are enabled. Instructions can be found here.
And we encourage turning on Automatic retry for ARB services. Read more about it here.
ACH payments
RaiseDonors can offer your donors the ability to pay via ACH. To enable this feature, you need to verify that your Authorize.net account has been set up to enable ACH features. You can sign up and/or verify this feature by logging into Authorize.net and navigating to Home > Account > Merchant Profile.
You can also review a list of ACH FAQ's from Authorize.net here.
What is the Delay for ARB Creation (in seconds)?
Authorize.net may need a little extra time to synchronize their systems when creating recurring schedules. If you are frequently seeing errors from Authorize.net related to recurring schedule creation, you'll want to adjust this value. By default, this value is set to 12 seconds.
Duplicate Window
A transaction with an identical amount and credit card information submitted within the Duplicate Transaction Window (exact details on what Authorize.net looks to compare here) will cause Authorize.net to throw an error "Error 11: A duplicate transaction has been submitted.". To prevent this from happening, you can adjust the window (in seconds) that Authorize.net looks atincoming donations for duplicates. By default this value is set to 120 seconds (two minutes).
What is the Silent Post URL?
Authorize.net sends updates to RaiseDonors through a feature called "Silent Post URL (soon to be deprecated). This is the only way in which RaiseDonors is made aware of changes from Authorize.net. RaiseDonors will supply this value to you. Log into yourAuthorize.netaccount, and navigate to Account > Settings > Transaction Format Settings > click the link for "Silent Post URL". Copy the silent post URL from RaiseDonors intoAuthorize.net.See herefor an example.
It's important to notethat if the Silent Post URL is in use for a different integration/purpose or empty, your recurring donations will still work, BUT, the charge from each instance of the recurring profile will not be reflected in RaiseDonors.
What Does "create payment profiles from each transaction" mean?
This instructs RaiseDonors to tokenize every payment method used to place a donation. Coming soon, you'll be able to use these tokens as a "donor wallet", allowing you to place donations on behalf of your donors without asking them to provide their payment information. In essence, you are securely saving their payment methods. Enabling this feature has no immediate functionality for you, but in the near future when the "donor wallet" is enabled, you'll have plenty of saved payment methods.
Order information
Transactions and schedules in Authorize.net both have sections for order information. You can customize what data is placed into the order information fields for both transactions and schedules.
Does Authorize.net Send Donors Emails?
By default, Authorize.net will send very informal and (kind of ugly) "transaction" email to your donors with information about the charge. You'll want to disable this feature in Authorize.net because RaiseDonors sends much more beautiful, responsive, and donor friendly emails. To do so, please follow the instructions here.
CVV requirements
If you wish for RaiseDonors to require the 3 or 4 digit security code (CVV) from your donors, you can configure RaiseDonors to always require the CVV code. From the Merchant Account tab, check the box for "CVV Required".
American Express
In RaiseDonors, you can enable or disable the acceptance of American Express. In the Merchant Account tab of RaiseDonors, there is a check box, to control the enabling or disabling of American Express. Whether or not you accept American Express is up to you as an organization and can be managed by the settings you have enabled in Authorize.net. Click here to learn how you can enable American Express in your Authorize.net account.
Review Required Fields
- Within your Authorize.net account, go to Account > Settings > Payment Form > Form Fields
- We recommend unchecking everything that says "required". If you must keep any entry as "required", ensure that field is also designated as "required" in RaiseDonors. If you don't have an entry marked as "required" in both Authorize.net and RaiseDonors, your donors are likely to get required field errors from Authorize.net when attempting to donate.
Customer Information Manager
Ensure the Authorize.net Customer Information Manager (CIM) module is enabled by following the step by step instructions here.