Introduction

With the release of API version 109.0, PayPal now supports credit card verifications, otherwise known as $0 authorizations.  This is something that’s long overdue, but it’s nice to finally see it come to fruition.

What Problem Does it Solve?

Previously, if you wanted to verify that a credit card was valid your only option was to run a $1.00 authorization against the card.  You could then immediately void the authorization, however, this practice is frowned upon by the credit card industry, and they really don’t want you running authorizations for transactions you don’t intend to process.  Sending an authorization request with a $0.00 amount resulted in an error, though, and it simply wouldn’t accept it.  As such, many developers found themselves doing $1.00 authorizations, and I’m sure PayPal was hearing about it from the credit card processors.

The Solution

With this new credit card verifications feature, PayPal has basically enabled what seemingly everybody tries to do the first time anyway, which is to simply send a $0.00 amount along with an authorization transaction to PayPal.

Instead of getting a flat out Failure response when you do this, now the PayPal API will return a SuccessWithWarning result with a 10574 error code that reads “Credit Card Verified”.  This is simply treated as a warning, and PayPal does this rather than send a full Success response so that merchants won’t mistake these transactions for actual transactions.

Conclusion

It’s great to see this introduced to the PayPal API’s and I will definitely be making use of it in my projects from here on out.  I highly recommend you do the same and stop running $1.00 authorization if that’s the practice you’ve been following before.  You’re no longer forced to, so you might as well follow the standard procedure.