Here is our problematic scenario:
- We collect credit card information either via phone or online store.
- We charge an initial subscription fee via AIM.
- We create an ARB subscription to recur annually, starting one year from the purchase date.
- After one year, the card is sometimes is invalid, and the transaction fails.
Currently, we receive emails notifying us of the failure, and take action based upon that information. Our customer base has grown to the point that this is no longer an efficient way of handling transaction failures. I understand that the officially endorsed solution to this problem is turning on silent posts. This is where my disappointment resides.
Silent posts are a dismal method of communicating information. The fact that there are no retries should a particular message fail to post makes the channel devastatingly unreliable. The data will need to be constantly audited to make sure that no network glitches, server stalls, or DNS malfunctions have occurred. If there were a way to query Authorize for any potential missed posts, then I would simply work around this issue and grudgingly move onto the next task. As there is not, I am left to post the following request.
Please create a method by which we may query the transaction history of an ARB subscription. This information is readily available in our account, and it seems that adding it to either the ARB API or the Transaction Details API would be trivial. As a developer, I understand that sometimes that which seems trivial is actually quite complex so I will accept that perhaps this is truly a difficult piece of logic to create. This request, however, has been made for years by people running into the same problem we face today.
If for some reason I have failed to discover that the solution to our problem has already been formed, then I humbly apologize for the criticism. I did my best to search the documentation, this forum, and the Internet abroad, but perhaps my skills with Google are less than they should be. Please point me to the solution if I have in fact missed it.
Sincerely,
Ian
