3.1 ETS customers experience abnormal number of credit card declines when running billing in 3.1
Problem
ETS customers experience abnormal number of credit card declines when running billing in 3.1.
Certain customers who use ETS as their Credit Card gateway for RecTrac have been experiencing an abnormal number of billing declines over the last several months.
Solution
Certain customers who use ETS as their Credit Card gateway for RecTrac have been experiencing an abnormal number of billing declines over the last several months. ETS and VSI have been working together on this issue and now have a handle on it.
In summary, there were tokens linked to the monthly billing accounts that were generated with a retail sale and not a billing record.' So even though a specific token was generated with the proper RecTrac profile and ETS clientid, it was not a proper token to be used for reoccurring billing. ETS explained that a token for billing requires different information than a retail sale, so the authorization was failing in this scenario.
At one customer site, VSI identified a single RecTrac User ID that had the billing/moto account linked as a purchase/retail credit card profile and as a billing profile. This is what clouded prior trouble shooting because the token was created under the proper ClientID, but it was not complete for billing. In other words, from the outside, everything looked valid.
As a rule, a moto account should never be linked for purchase (although there is currently no way to prevent this in the software), and in the case of this particular customer there was but one User ID with this bad configuration. In RecTrac terms, the user was able to sell a membership to a patron and make a regular payment for it with the patron's Credit Card, and then go back into the billing and link that card/token combination to the billing record. Because the profile was linked as both a 'purchase/retail' and 'billing' profile, user had no way of knowing what type of token was generated.
With ETS, you MUST have separate Credit Card profiles for Retail and Billing. You cannot link a single profile and make multiple selections in the Profile Assignment Add dialog.
At present, the steps to correct are as follows:
1. Make certain you have at least two (2) separate profiles: one for Normal Retail/Purchase and one for Normal Retail/Billing.
2. Delete all credit card profiles from the user and re-add. When re-adding, make certain to select one and only one profile type (purchase OR Installment billing).
3. Link the second profile. When linking the second profile, make certain to select the OTHER profile ID. So if you select the Installment Billing profile in Step 2 above, you will select the Purchase profile when linking the second profile.
4. Identify the customer accounts linked to the bills experiencing the declines. Go into the billing setup for those accounts and remove the old card/token. Then add them back as if they were new cards, being certain to use the Billing profile. This will generate the proper token.