Nowadays many eCommerce sites are using Authorize.net to accept credit card payments. It is quite convenient, especially if the site has a Customer Information Manager (CIM) extension which allows saving cards and thus avoids entering the same information every time a customer tries to buy something. But there is a non-obvious limitation that appears only in quite rare cases.
The thing is that Authorize.net has a limitation - no more than 10 payment profiles available for a customer account. This isn’t a small number and is enough in most cases, but still, if you try to find more information, you’ll see a lot of complaints here and there. Despite that, the number stays unchanged.
How can the issue be detected?
The scenario is quite simple. A customer tries to create an order with a new card and can’t complete the checkout process. But the exact detail depends on the CIM extension you’re using:
- the customer may see the error code E00042 or the error text “You cannot add more than 10 payment profiles.”;
- the customer may see an error message that explains nothing, like “Ooops, something went wrong”;
- the customer may not see any error. The “Place Order” button won’t do any action and the only output may be available in the browser console only.
The two latter cases are much worse compared to the first one because they do not provide any useful information to the customer and your support team and you’ll need to spend much more information to debug the issue.
There are a few possible ways to diagnose the issue.
First of all, if you have access to the merchant account, you may open the customer’s profile and check the number of saved cards. If there are ten of them, please contact the customer and ask to remove the not-used ones.
If you’re a support manager or developer and haven’t access to the account, you may ask the customer to check it themselves.
And another option is to check the logs of the CIM extension (if they’re not available - activate them, and ask the customer to reproduce the issue again). So if you see a response such as:
array (
'refId' => 'A1000127',
'messages' =>
array (
'resultCode' => 'Error',
'message' =>
array (
'code' => 'E00042',
'text' => 'You cannot add more than 10 payment profiles.',
),
),This means that you encountered the described issue.
When does the issue appear?
As it was mentioned, 10 payment profiles isn’t a small number, so it can’t be hit quite often. However that still happens for example if this is a customer who registered a long time ago, buys often, and has a few different cards from different banks. Sooner or later some of them expire and still clutter the account if they’re not deleted.
Another case is a family sharing the same account (for example for increasing discounts) but keeping the expenses separated. It is not unusual for a person to have a few cards, so the limit can be exceeded quite easily.
And another thing you’ll need to take into account. It depends on the CIM extension you’re using. For example, you encountered the issue, advised the customer to delete a card from their account, but it persists. You do need to check the profile through your Authorize.net merchant account. You may discover that the card was not deleted. It may happen due to a bug in the CIM extension, or because of intentionally implemented logic. For example, the extension noticed that the customer recently made an order with this card. It means that there’s a chance to get a refund and it won’t be possible if the card is deleted. So, some of the CIM extensions may not delete the card, but instead, just mark it as scheduled for removing and hide from the customer’s account while it stays available in the profile at Authorize.net CIM. Both bug or intentional logic are reasons to have it reviewed by your developers.
