A merchant recently ran into an issue when integrating with us. They were trying to eliminate credit card data from their environment and instead store that data in the Braintree vault. When a credit card is stored in the vault, we generate a random token that can be used to charge the credit card in the future. Merchants may also choose to specify the token. In modern systems, merchants can usually replace credit card numbers with tokens without a problem. However, this merchant was working with a legacy system, and due to the way that the legacy system is designed, the only data field where the merchant can store the token is the field that formerly holds the credit card number. The problem was that the system validates that credit card numbers pass a Luhn-10 check, but the random tokens that we generate are short, random strings. The merchant could have generated their own Luhn-valid tokens, but there was an additional constraint: due to the way that their support team used the legacy system, they needed the last 4 digits of the token to match the last 4 digits of the credit card. Shoehorning our vault into this application was not going to be as easy as we usually make things for merchants.
We decided to solve the problem by building a Luhn-10 token generator for this merchant and other merchants that might be in a similar situation. The token that we generate will start with the same number as the actual credit card number, and the last 4 digits of the token will match the last 4 digits of the actual credit card number. With this in place, the merchant has successfully integrated their legacy system with the Braintree vault. This entirely eliminated the handling, processing, and storage of credit card data from their environment, which has made it much simpler for them to achieve PCI compliance and improve security.
Legacy system owners, we feel your pain and we're here to help!
Comments: 0 | Post a CommentWe are really excited to announce our latest release of recurring billing features. We have always offered recurring billing as a service and with this release we have enhanced our offerings. We strive to be the best payments provider in the industry, and frequent enhancements to our existing functionality is one way we do that. Below is a list of the new features that we have added.
If your subscription has a trial period, billing will begin at the end of that trial period. If your subscription does not have a trial period, you can opt to start billing immediately, on a specific date, or on a specific day of month. For example, if you’re selling something related to the upcoming football season, you may want to collect subscriptions now but not begin billing until the regular season starts. Alternatively, if you only care about having your subscriptions recur on the 1st of every month (for instance), you can now easily set up a plan for that. The possibilities are endless! Because you can now start your subscription in the future we have introduced a new status called pending. Any subscription with a start date in the future and no trial period will have this status.
Previously you would have to explicitly cancel a subscription if you wanted to end it. You now have an additional option that allows you to specify the number of cycles you would like the subscription to be billed. We have introduced another status of expired. For a subscription with a set number of cycles, its status will become expired after it’s been billed that number of times.
Do you offer promotional periods? Do you give discounts to some of your best customers? Well, you’re in luck: we’ve added that capability. You can configure discounts to be deducted from the subscription price for the entire duration of the subscription or you can specify the number of billing periods that you would like to offer it. Discounts can be added to the plan and will be inherited by the subscription. However you will still have the flexibility to customize the discounts on the subscription and tailor it to your customers’ needs.
Do you offer additional services or products that are outside your standard plans? Well now you can add away. We have added the ability to create add-ons for your subscription. You can configure add-ons to be added to the subscription price for the entire duration of the subscription or you can specify the number of billing periods that you would like to offer it. Add-ons (like discounts) can be added to the plan and will be inherited by the subscription but you still have the flexibility to configure the add-on on a per-subscription basis.
We have added the ability to search by subscription id, billing periods remaining, and price to the subscription search. We have also made it easier to select and search by plans. As we keep adding features we will continue to enhance our searching capabilities.
Previously this was not an option. We have now added the ability to delete plans that have no subscriptions tied to them. We hope this will aid in keeping your plan data uncluttered.
To see a full list of our features check out our recurring billing page.
Thanks for reading!
Braintree Dev Team
Thanks to a collaborative effort between Braintree devs and the Spree community, we're psyched to announce that the Ruby open-source e-commerce platform Spree now supports Braintree as a payment gateway.
Check out our guest post on the Spree blog for more details.
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