Dharma Merchant Services / authorize.net (and recurring contributions) ?

[galgeek]

Wondering if anyone here has experience using one of TechSoup's partners, Dharma Merchant Services, http://www.dharmamerchantservices.com/, via their authorize.net payment gateway, as a payment processor?

I'm especially wondering about recurring transactions with authorize.net.  The organization I'm working with derives lots of its income from recurring donations, many direct debit transactions and a number of credit card transactions, currently mostly via QuickBooks Merchant Services, though with Civi, we've started out with an existing PayPal Standard account.  If we could centralize all the recurring donation in one place, with everything processed by Civi, allowing backoffice processing, and not requiring that individuals have a PayPal account (but won't there be a similar account, with authorize.net, for recurring donations?), that would be swell.  If there were clear notification of expired cards and other declines, that would be even better.

is there a better authorize.net reseller to work with?

[adixon]

I have a client that switched over to Dharma about 6 months ago from a different provider that also used authorize.net. It was pretty easy - just updated the credentials in the payment processor configuration and it was done.

On the other hand, they don't use any fancy stuff like paying attention to credit card expiries, or much in the way of recurring payments.

In any case, in theory yes, it sounds like you can centralize to only using authorize.net for your online transactions. Any (offline) transactions that are not going through authorize.net can be managed using the "offline recurring payment" extension, though that'll need a bit more hands on administration.