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Answered
Hi, Leighton,
We are currently setting up the membership suit (using ms_core 2.4) to allow users to purchase memberships on our site. I have seen the forum post here, where you stated that CIM and ARB should only be switched on together if you used ARB before CIM.
I was curious to see if there was any way around this or if there was a plan to allow both of these to be used together in the future? We would like to have bot the 'CIM' and 'ARB' features. We are using authorize.net as our gateway.
Thanks,
Steve
Steve,
CIM supersedes the functionality of ARB. CIM can do everything that ARB can do and more. If you have the option, just stick with CIM.
To break it down, let's discuss what the two features are:
ARB lets you charge recurring payments to customers. The recurring schedules are stored in Authorize.net's database and are charged automatically when they should be by Authorize.net. Users aren't able to switch their memberships (upgrade/downgrade) very easily because of this.
CIM lets you store customer payment profiles in their secure database but still charge it whenever you want through an API call. This lets your users easily upgrade/downgrade their memberships. Charges are put forth during Cron runs on your site, so you need to make sure that you have Cron running every hour or so. CIM also allows your site to 'remember' the customer's billing information, so they don't have to keep entering it over and over again. This is nice since it saves users an extra step when they want to make future purchases.
I highly suggest CIM over ARB. ARB is a bit buggy from my experience.
-Leighton