All About Authorize.net

Authorize.net is Cobalt’s recommended payment processor, as the enhancement of their platform’s offerings over time has allowed Cobalt to offer expanded payment functionality that was not previously possible. Recurring payments, payment plans, and payment profiles are some of the Cobalt-supported benefits that come with choosing Authorize.net.

Authorize.net offers three plan options  all have a flat $25 monthly gateway fee with $0 setup. Each plan has a variable processing rate per transaction.

Which plan you choose will depend on whether you have an existing merchant account, and the type of transactions you anticipate. Authorize.net has a great blog, “What is a payment gateway?”, that defines what a payment gateway is, and how it differs from a merchant account.

Cobalt does not require Authorize.net to be both the gateway and the processor.

Both the Authorize.net All-in-One and Payment Gateway Only plans include the Customer Information Manager (CIM), which is used for payment profiles, and recurring payments, which are used for payment plans. If you are using either of the plans referenced above, you most likely just need to enable these features within Authorize.net. However, ACH/eCheck capabilities are not included with a standard (Payment Gateway) Authorize.net account. For more information, see here.  If you currently have a merchant account that supports ACH and do not want to make the switch to Authorize.net, no worries  you can configure the standard account to utilize your own merchant account that supports ACH.  If you are using a non-Authorize.net merchant account, you will need to coordinate that setup separately with your Authorize.net and merchant account representatives..

Please note that Authorize.net requires users to have a merchant account to be eligible for the Payment Gateway Only or the Payment Gateway And eCheck plans. Users who do not have an existing merchant account will want to either opt for the All-In-One or find a separate merchant account to configure with Authorize.net.

You can get started with Authorize.net by contacting them on their site or calling them at 1-888-323-4289 to request information or ask any questions about custom pricing based on volume or non-profit status. This cost is not included as a part of Cobalt’s SaaS licensing.

Authorize.net will work with you to set up your payment gateway.  You will need to provide Cobalt with the API Login ID and the API Transaction Key values. Once your payment gateway is set up and we have the values, Cobalt can then connect to Authorize.net.

• Credit card transactions take a full day to settle.
• Authorize.net has a default setting that limits five (5) transactions from an IP address per hour; when the limit is reached, any additional transactions will be flagged and must be approved manually within 5 business days or they will be declined. This is controlled by the “Transaction IP Velocity Filter”, which is a part of the Authorize.net advance fraud detection suite.
  • To prevent widespread declined payments, this setting in the should be updated so that the transaction limit is increased.
• To support multi-currency with Authorize.net, multiple accounts will need to be provisioned.
• Authorize.net requires specific values while testing in the sandbox. Use the testing guide for specific card numbers, checking accounts, and values to trigger specific statuses.