The market is full of payment gateways, and all online merchants face the challenge of selecting the best ones to integrate into their online stores. If you Google “best payment gateways”, you are sure to come across Authorize.NET somewhere close to the top. We also believe that this payment service is one of the most effective, and today we would like to make a brief overview of Authorize.NET and highlight its most important features.

Authorize.NET is a subsidiary of Visa, which means that the service is backed by the tried and tested mechanisms used by Visa in the processing of payments. Authorize.NET is supported in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and Australia, therefore, merchants located in any of these countries can enjoy the full range of advanced payment processing services provided by Authorize.NET, as well as top-notch protection.

Main features of Authorize.NET

We have put together a brief overview of Authorize.NET features that make it an effective and secure payment method for online stores.

Acceptance of all major credit cards and payment services

When you set up Authorize.NET as one of your payment methods, you provide your customers with the ability to choose any of the most popular credit cards and payment services - Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, and a number of others. Besides, Authorize.NET enables acceptance of e-checks and various mobile payment options.

Fraud prevention

Authorize.NET includes a highly customizable fraud prevention suite. There are 13 fraud filters that you can set up to create a fraud prevention system corresponding to your business needs.

Using the filters, you can configure alerts or transaction blocking based on IP address, transaction amount, number of transactions within one day or one hour. Filters can be set to verify whether the billing address matches the shipping address and stop transactions in case of a mismatch.

Authorize.NET also allows verification of the credit card data and rejection of transactions with credit cards that do not pass the verification.

The fraud prevention mechanisms are available together with the main Authorize.NET package at no additional charge.

Customer Information Manager and customer profiles

Authorize.NET allows processing so-called “recurring payments” using the payment data stored during previous transactions. With the “card on file” feature, customers do not need to re-enter their credit card details if they wish to use the same card.

Besides the payment information, the service also stores the shipping address that can be used to populate the order form during subsequent purchases. The customer profile can contain more than one form of payment and shipping address allowing the customer to choose the appropriate one. The stored data can be updated by the customer, as necessary.

Customer data security

Authorize.NET stores lots of sensitive data, such as customers’ names and credit card details, therefore, it applies advanced security mechanisms to protect such data from theft. The credit card details are stored on secure servers.

The Customer Information Manager allows users to tokenize their details to store them on Authorize.NET servers. Such tokenization, as well as other security measures applied by the payment gateway, makes it PCI DSS compliant.

Mobile in-app transactions

For mobile eCommerce apps, Authorize.NET provides an opportunity to enable credit card payment processing directly within the application. In this case, the credit card data is not forwarded to the mobile app server, therefore, a higher level of protection is achieved.

Besides credit cards, Authorize.NET also supports Apple Pay and Android Pay services, thus offering multiple options for the customers and allowing the merchant to reach the maximum user audience.

Visa Checkout as a standalone feature

For Visa cardholders, Visa Checkout is a sort of a single sign-on to multiple devices and shopping platforms. Instead of entering their credit card details, Visa Checkout users simply enter their login and password with their actual payment details processed in the background.

Authroize.NET supports Visa Checkout as a standalone feature that online merchants can integrate into their shopping platforms. With Visa Checkout, your customers will obtain a transparent and easy checkout flow that can both increase the customer satisfaction rate and reduce the cart abandonment rate.

PayPal Express Checkout

Through Authorize.NET, you can integrate the PayPal Express Checkout feature into your shopping cart. For customers with PayPal accounts, the checkout will be as simple as one-click confirming their purchase.

This way, you will enable quick and intuitive shopping for your customers and attract the multi-million PayPal user audience.

Transaction reporting

For online merchants, Authorize.NET provides a comprehensive transaction reporting functionality allowing to monitor their payments and analyze various transaction-related data.

For example, by installing the Authorize.NET payment method, you are getting complete transaction lists with their details, lists of unsettled transactions, transactions by a specific customer profile, batch transaction statistics, and so on.

Authorize.NET Accept developer suite

Authorize.NET Accept is intended for developers of eCommerce websites and mobile apps and includes a number of tools for building online commerce platforms. Web and mobile online stores built with Authorize.NET Accept work with all popular browsers and allow processing both credit cards and e-checks. Most versions of Authorize.NET Accept support hosted payment forms.

What is also important is that eCommerce platforms built with Authorize.NET Accept have inherent PCI compliance mechanisms, thus, the merchants do not need to implement additional measures to ensure compliance.

Authorize.NET major update

Wrapping up our little research, we would like to remind that on June 1, 2019, Authorize.NET will discontinue using MD5 hash for transaction verification and switch to SHA-512. If you are running a Magento 2 web store and using Authorize.NET as a payment method, you will, most probably, be unable to process payments after this update. You can read more about this change and its implications in our blog.

To continue uninterrupted usage of Authorize.NET, you will need to apply a patch that may be a challenging task for an online merchant with little coding skills. Alternatively, you can use our Authorize.NET extension for Magento 2 that already includes the updated verification algorithm and will require no special patching.

Should you need any additional information on using or installing the Authorize.NET extension, contact us, and our support engineers will gladly assist you and consult on any matters related to implementing Authorize.NET in a Magento 2 web store.