Authorize.Net
More info
- Creator
- Jeff Knowles
- Released
- Owner
- Visa
- Type
- Payment gateway
- Website
- authorize.net
The American small merchant's payment gateway since 1996, with an API that has outlived most of its users' shopping carts.
Founded in Utah in 1996, it became the default for US web shops through the 2000s: get a merchant account from your bank, put Authorize.Net in front of it. The integrations were called AIM, where the shop posted card data directly, and SIM, where the customer was bounced to a hosted payment page — effectively the early web's two schools of thought on handling card numbers.
Lightbridge bought it in 2004, CyberSource bought Lightbridge in 2007, and the whole stack landed at Visa in 2010. In July 2009 a fire at the Fisher Plaza data centre in Seattle knocked the service offline, leaving hundreds of thousands of merchants unable to take cards going into the Fourth of July weekend. It remains one of the industry's favourite arguments for geographic redundancy.