Developer's Guide

Submitting Credit Card Transactions
Submitting Reference Transactions (Tokenization)
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66 31 July 2012 Gateway Developer Guide and Reference
Submitting Reference Transactions (Tokenization)
To recharge a credit card when you are not storing the credit card information in your local
database, you can perform a reference transaction. A reference transaction takes the existing
credit card information that is on file and reuses it. (Securely storing data for future reference
is also known as tokenization.)
The PNREF returned in the original transaction is valid for use in reference transactions for 12
months. You can also use the PNREF account verification returns in a reference transaction.
When To Use a Reference Transaction
Say that Joe Smith purchases a holiday gift from your website store and requests that you send
it by UPS ground service. That evening, Joe becomes concerned that the item might not arrive
in time for the holiday. So Joe calls you to upgrade shipping to second-day air. You obtain
Joe’s approval for charging an extra $10 for the upgrade. In this situation, you can create a
reference transaction based on the original authorization and charge an additional $10 to Joe’s
credit card without having to ask him again for credit card information.
NOTE: As a security measure, reference transactions are disallowed by default. Only your
account administrator can enable reference transactions for your account. If you
attempt to perform a reference transaction in an account that does not allow reference
transactions, Payflow returns RESULT value 117. See PayPal Manager online help for
instructions on setting reference transactions and other security features.
Sale and authorization transactions can use a reference transaction as a source of transaction
data. Payflow looks up the reference transaction and copies its transaction data into the new
sale or authorization. Except for dollar amount data, which triggers a filter if out of range,
Fraud Protection Service filters do not screen reference transactions.
NOTE: When the Gateway looks up the reference transaction, it does not alter in any way the
transaction referenced or any other transaction in the database. A reference transaction
is a read-only operation. Payflow populates with data and acts upon the new
transaction only. It does not maintain any linkage between the reference transaction
and the new transaction.
You can also initiate reference transactions from PayPal Manager. See PayPal Manager online
help for details.
Transaction Types That Can Be Used As the Original Transaction
You can reference the following transaction types to supply data for a new sale or
authorization transaction:
 Authorization (To capture the funds for an approved authorization transaction, be sure to
perform a delayed capture transaction—not a reference transaction.)
 Credit