The Anthem Blog » Anthem Labs (Development)

Authorize.NET – Invalid Merchant Number (205)

Shawn Borsky - The Boss — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:36:03 +0000

Hello all -

So as a company that does a ton of e-commerce, we tend to be using Authorize.NET to do online credit card processing.
Recently, we had quite an ordeal trying to figure out a seemingly simple issue.

The Problem : We had the PHP Class sending the transactions to Authorize.NET and every time it was returning a Decline.

The Error : Transaction Status: General Error (Request rejected by FDC omaha – Invalid merchant number) ( The Error Code is 205)

The Solution : This is not a developer issue! HA! Wish I had known that 3 hours before we figured it out. This means that the Payment Processor for Authorize.NET is telling them that there information and active status on your client does not match the information Authorize has or that they are not set to active status.

I hope this helps other developers out.

Regards

Web Development Task Breakdown

Shawn Borsky - The Boss — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:37:01 +0000

This chart is funny, because its actually quite accurate.

I wanted to make a quick post for other web developers to enjoy it.
Also for non web developers to understand why most of us really hate IE, its nothing personal, it just makes our job harder and forces any work we do to take 3 times longer.

…Okay, I guess making our job harder and more frustrating makes it personal.

Anthem is dropping support for IE6

Shawn Borsky - The Boss — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:22:47 +0000

The new year has started well for web developers :

Google Advises Users to Drop IE6

With Google and MobileMe officially dropping support for IE6 and now commanding only a 19% market share and dropping fast.
Anthem has decided to also officially drop direct support for Internet Explorer 6 for our websites. However, we still support it when our client’s
target demographic calls for it and also within portals and intranets.

It has an eight year run, but I think its time. With barely any PNG support, support for CSS 1.0 and consistent Javascript rendering errors IE6 is a bit outdated.
This will simply make web development one browser easier.

As a note, Anthem currently builds our websites to work flawlessly in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 Beta2, Firefox 2 and 3 , Safari 3, Opera 9 , and Google Chrome.

And we now officially remove Internet Explorer 6 from that list.