Authnet - Reliable, Cheap, Secure
Rating: 10 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Authorize.Net as our payment processor for both our in-house bespoke ordering system, and for out online shopping cart in BigCommerce. It replaced another processor, Transaction Express. Authnet provides the features and security that we need while also maintaining a low overhead cost for our company. We haven't been able to beat their fee schedules with any alternatives yet. They've always been very reliable and easy to work with as well.
Pros
- Very smooth workflow to authorizing, capturing, voiding, and refunding charges. This can all be done via API calls, or through their online dashboard.
- Their AVS settings for validating credit cards are substantial and have been reliable in ensuring that our customers cards are being used safely and properly.
- Their uptime and response times are very good in general. The only issues we ever have communicating with their services is when our connection quality is compromised.
Cons
- Their webhooks that provide automated alerts on transactions, subscriptions, and other events are less than reliable. We had significant difficulty with them not arriving consistently, and when they are missed they can be very difficult to regenerate.
- It is probably more related to banking guidelines, but it can be frustrating when a customer pays up front for an item on backorder, and then has to cancel their order later. Depending on the length of time, Authnet may not allow the refund to be conducted to the card.
- I think this is also on the individual card issuer, but some of the errors for card declines are opaque. There are very transparent and specific errors available, but a lot of issuers just provide back a generic "please contact card issuer" instead of giving a reason for a decline.
Likelihood to Recommend
Authnet is extremely good at providing API accessibility for authorizing and capturing transactions. We used their API to connect to our bespoke in house ordering system. This was a critical implementation for us, and was not reliably available from many other providers at that time. They have been consistently reliable and are mostly ahead of the game on implementing important features. On the opposite end of the spectrum, their webhooks for providing automated alerts are very unreliable. We were relying on them to capture information on automated recurring billing events, but they were so unreliable we had to retool the system and completely eliminate the ARB aspect. We resorted to leaning on internal scheduling jobs combined with tradition API calls to make transactions instead.
GM
Gary McCarthy
IT Programmer in Information Technology at Pneudart (Medical Device, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
8 years of experience