Server Release Notes for March 8, 2006

These release notes apply to both the ICS test and production servers.

Subscription Payments Services: Issue Resolved with One-time Credits

This release fixes an issue that had temporarily caused one-time credits (sometimes referred to as on-demand credits) to stop working. A one-time credit is a refund (credit) that you request with a subscription ID. The credit service automatically uses the information stored in the CyberSource database for that subscription (the customer's name, billing address, credit card number, and so on). The bug caused your credit request to be incorrectly rejected with an error message saying that your request was missing required fields.

Subscription Payments Services: New API Fields

With this release you can use a new field when creating a subscription: paySubscriptionCreateService_disableAutoAuth (for the Simple Order API) or recurring_disable_auto_auth (for the SCMP API). This field works if you have your account configured so that CyberSource normally performs a $1.00 pre-authorization before creating a subscription. If you include the field in your request to create a subscription, CyberSource does NOT perform the $1.00 pre-authorization before creating that subscription.

Also with this release, you can provide these additional fields below in your request to create or update a subscription. The information in these fields will be associated with any scheduled payments or one-time payments/credits that use the subscription. When you use the Retrieve service to get a subscription's information, this new information is included in the reply. Information about all of these fields is in the Customer Profiles Developer's Guide (previously called the Subscription Payments Implementation Guide), which is available on the Support Center.

Simple Order API:
shipTo_firstName
shipTo_lastName
shipTo_street1
shipTo_street2
shipTo_city
shipTo_state
shipTo_postalCode
shipTo_country
shipTo_company
recurringSubscriptionInfo_billPayment
merchantDefinedData_field1
merchantDefinedData_field2
merchantDefinedData_field3
merchantDefinedData_field4

SCMP API:
ship_to_firstname
ship_to_lastname
ship_to_address1
ship_to_address2
ship_to_city
ship_to_state
ship_to_zip
ship_to_company_name
ship_to_country
bill_payment
merchant_defined_data1
merchant_defined_data2
merchant_defined_data3
merchant_defined_data4

Subscription Payments Services: Installment vs. Recurring Subscriptions

With this release, when you create a subscription that has regularly scheduled payments, you can now differentiate between an "installment" subscription and a "recurring" subscription. An installment subscription has a fixed number of periodic payments, while a recurring subscription continues indefinitely or until you cancel the subscription.

Information about installment and recurring subscriptions is in the Secure Data Suite User's Guide (a new guide) and the Customer Profiles Developer's Guide (previously called the Subscription Payments Implementation Guide). Both guides are available on the Support Center.

Subscription Payments Services: Changes to E-mail Notifications

With the subscriptions services, you can have us send e-mail messages to your customers when a successful payment occurs or when a payment fails and the subscription goes on hold. With this release, you can also have us send pre-notification messages to your customers 7 days before we collect the payments. Also, for each type of e-mail notification, you can now specify your own header and footer that will be added to each e-mail message. You can do this in the Enterprise Business Center, in the Subscription Settings page. For more information, see the Secure Data Suite User's Guide, which is available on the Support Center.

Decision Manager: New List Manager Feature

With this release, CyberSource is introducing an integrated positive and negative list management feature that you can access through the Enterprise Business Center or through the API. List Manager provides total access to your lists and control over their contents.

You may already have a positive list for your most trustworthy customers. Now you can add the content of your positive list to Decision Manager. In addition, you can add customers to your positive list for a specific number of days (1 to 30 days). This feature may be useful when you reject an order because of an issue that was resolved during review. If you find a reviewed order acceptable, you can temporarily add the customer to your positive list so that when the customer places the same order again, it is automatically accepted. You set an expiration date because you do not want to add this customer permanently to your positive list.

The two lists below show how you can plan and update your lists manually by using the List Manager menu and automatically by using the links provided in the details page for each transaction.

Manually by using the List Manager Menu:

  • Select settings for the temporary positive list.
  • Add records to your temporary and permanent positive lists.
  • Add records to your negative list.
  • Search, download, update, and upload your lists.

Automatically by using these links in the transaction details page:

  • Mark As Temporarily Trusted
  • Mark As Trusted
  • Mark As Suspect
  • Remove From History (hide the score from your transaction history)

In addition, you can add records to and delete records from your positive and negative lists by using the Simple Order API or the SCMP API.

For more information on List Manager, see the Decision Manager Planning Guide, the Developer's Guide, and the new tutorial. All of these are available on the Support Center.

Simple Order API (formerly the Web Services API)

Version 1.19 of the Simple Order API has been released. For information about what has changed, see the Simple Order API Release Notes, which are available on the Support Center.