MasterCard and Discover are modifying their rules concerning processing of debit, prepaid and gift cards. MasterCard’s rule changes went into effect 5/1/2010 and Discover’s rule changes went into effect on 4/16/2010. Merchants using Authorize.Net have until 6/30/2011 to comply with the new standards but since I am compliance hound I wanted to make these changes immediately.

Since I was reading up on all of the documentation and re-working my API code accordingly I figured I would share the changes with everyone in hopes of saving people a bit of time when they sit down to modify their own code.

So what’s new?
– Balance response transactions
– Partial authorization transactions
– Authorization reversals

So what does all that mean?
Transactions made on a gift/debt/etc card can now be split among multiple cards using partial authorization and the splitTenderId value. This value “links” the authorization request to subsequent transactions.

The new API request fields to pay attention to are ['x_allow_partial_Auth'] which is either true or false and ['x_split_tender_id'] which gets set to the original authorization request value.

The new relay response reply fields are as follows:
['x_account_number'] = last 4 digits of card
['x_card_type'] = string value indicating the type of card used
['x_split_tender_id'] = original authorization value
['x_prepaid_requested_amount'] = amount requested in original auto
['x_prepaid_balance_on_card'] = balance on the debit/prepaid card

The obvious things to note here (aside from the tender id) are the card balance and the requested amount. With these two values you can easily determine if the transaction can go through or if a subsequent transaction (w/ the sane tender id) has been requested.

New response codes to take note of are the following:
Reason: 295 Code: 4 — Amount was only partially approved
Reason: 296 Code: 3 — The splitTenderId is invalid.
Reason: 297 Code: 3 — A trans ID and a Split Tender ID can’t both be used in a single transaction request.
Reason: 298 Code: 3 — The splitTenderId has been completed (released or voided) and can not be associated with new transactions.

Here is what a sample relay repines looks like: (Taken from official documentation)

Hopefully this summary helps identify the changes that need to be made and why. All of this information can be found in the official documentation which is available at: http://www.authorize.net/support/pafaqs/

- Nicholas

Tags: api, authorize, credit processing, Development, kreidberg, nicholas, niczak, PHP, Programming