Magento: Confusion with Recurring Profiles and Authorize.net ARB or CIM

Question

The next big topic in my new start-up company is recurring billing inside Magento. We will have a few recurring products we'd like to offer alongside some standard one-time products. I've researched the best gateways and so far we think either ARB or CIM from Authorize.net is the way to go.

Some questions come up though such as:

1. If Authorize.net is going to handle the recurring aspect, what is the point of Magento's built-in recurring profiles system? As far as I can tell it's to integrate with the 3rd party by actually taking the user to the 3rd party site? Using Authorize.net would eliminate the need for recurring profiles right?
2. Are we limited to purchasing one of two or three $300 modules out there to get started with ARB or CIM? So far Magento only supports SIM or DPM. Or do I have to sit down and extend the built-in Authorize.net payment method? Basically I am trying to say we are on a start-up budget and $300 is a killer at this moment.
3. If we went with ARB over CIM that means if a customer came back to purchase a second item later on that they would have to re-enter their information (CC #, exp. date, etc.) whereas CIM would have this ready to go...is that the correct explanation?
4. We need the flexibility to create unique payment schedules during checkout. For example: We will sell a custom website and hosting package. We want to charge the user 50% of the website cost upfront and 50% upon completion and setup a recurring payment for the hosting package all at time of checkout.
5. Along with question #4, currently Magento's recurring profiles limit nominal items to be purchased separately than regular products. This is not acceptable for us and a customer must be able to purchase all wanted items together in one checkout page.

Sorry for this lengthy post but I'm very curious to see what our options might be given all we want/need to do. Any advise is good advice!

Answer 1

1. The Magento recurring billing code allows customers to view and edit their subscription inside the Magento webstore, so there's no redirection to third party.
2. Short answer: yes, or roll your own.
3. I believe that is the case, but you need to check with Authorize.Net on that.
4. Not sure what the question is here?
5. Then refer to your earlier question on this topic that I answered. You can choose to override the core functionality, but you need to familiarize yourself with the reasons why Magento chose to enforce that restriction. I believe that is likely due to a restriction in the Paypal interface, and other recurring billing gateways such as Authorize.Net may be able to cope with one-off and recurring items in the same transaction.

HTH,
JD