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Can't get real merchant account to work- frustrated at the lack of C# documentation and examples

I used the sample code for C# in conjunction with a test account to get a test account to accept or deny payments.  Next I wanted to change to my own merchant account, so I changed the LoginID and TransactionKey to match what is on my actual authorize.net account.

 

The sample code however will not accept a request.  I am 100% sure that my LoginID and TransactionKey are correct.  When I call gate.send, my response has approve as false and the message says "The merchant Log in ID or password is incorrect, or the account is inactive."

 

From everything I can tell, my account is active, but is in test mode.  So I tried setting gate.TestMode=true.

 

As I have been looking through my security settings, it appears that I will need to post more information in order for something to approve, but I would expect to get a different failure message if I omit the customer address than the one I am getting.  I run into lots of questions but the AIM implementation guide is mum on the subjects (at least in terms of how they pertain to C#).  The documentation you can see via Visual Studio isn't very complete either.

 

So I have several questions:

1.  resquest.Address: is this the address that the request should send to (eg https://secure.authorize.net/gateway/transact.dll) or is this the customer address?  If it is not the address that the request sends to, then what is it under the hood that made the test one work, and what would I have to magically do to not post to test.authorize.net...?

2.  How would I work with request.AddCustomer?  Is that the proper way to add a customer's information, or can I set the first name, customer email etc right on the request?

3.  I assume that request.EmailCustomer is the email address of the customer?  So what is request.Email? 

4.  Most forms I see have a single field for customer name, usually labeled Name on Card.  The request has a first and last name.  So if the name on the card were John H Doe, should I just send FirstName=John, LastName = Doe?  I would have expected that we would have a field for the name as it is on the card which would have been more consistent with what customers are used to seeing.

 

In general, it feels really frustrating to have a sample code snippet that will "get you started in 15 minutes" when in reality there is nothing I can find that actually bridges the gap between the ultimately meaningless test merchant account to working on a real one.  I would be very thankful to anyone who has answers to these questions, and even more grateful to someone who could post an example that basically is that starting sample code with the proper way to add customer address information and make sure that the request goes to the real server and not the test one.

 

thanks,

 

Danny

DannyStaten
Member
2 REPLIES 2

Ok so I found a way to get my post to work, but I still have to cry lameness.  Why does the quick start guide have an SDK we can download for our AIM integration, and yet the sample code you download for an actual project doesn't use the SDK?  If I go via a plain standard HTTP request, and do the sample code's method where we build the post string and stream it into our request, then I can get it to actually post and perform correctly in test mode.

 

So I found a way to get it to work.  I guess what I am finding out is that the SDK that is made available and promoted in the quick start sections on the site seems to be incomplete, and have zero documentation.  Kind of a frustrating thing that held me up for a while.

DannyStaten
Member

Hey Danny,

 

I'm glad you found a solution. I've still passed on your feedback concerning the lack of documentation on the SDK to our development teams though. We appreciate the feedback!

 

Thanks,

 

Michelle

Developer Community Manager