Delay credit card charge with Authorize.net until order ships

[AJMead]

I am creating a new eCommerce site for a client and they need to delay charging their customers' credit cards until they ship the order.  Their gateway is Authorize.net.  I know this option is not available through BC even though Authorize.net provides the capability (via AUTH_ONLY).

Has anyone  found a work-around for this?

[smitchell80 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Unfortunately we do not have an option for this and the only gateway that perhaps could be a workaround is to use PayPal Standard as there's an option to manually finalize the transaction when ready. 

Kind regards,

-Sidney

[AJMead]

Thanks Sidney.  I will present this option to my client. I think they were set on using Authorize.net, but may change their mind.

[BluPark]

Do you guys know if this works with PayPal Pro?

We are in a similar situation and need to have all transactions authorized only, then charge the customer maybe using BC CRM with the actual amount once it is finalized?

[BluPark]

Just an update. I was not able to do this with PayPal Pro.

[johnsom5]

I too have this same issue.

I looked into our Authorize.net account but couldn't see any option to allow a "Auth_only" request to come in.

Maybe it's not as simple a solution as I expect it to be.

We have another website made from a different company (not a BC site), and in the payment gateway section there is an option to process orders as authorize only through Authorize.net.

If their platform can send that type of reuqest to Authorize.net, why can't we do the same?

BC tech support told me there was no solution and to try the forums, but seeing as this is an old thread, the outlook for a resolution seems grim.

If anybody has a workaround to this, please chime in!

[mario_gudelj]

There's no workaround for this. BC needs to send AUTH_ONLY flag to auth.net,

which it can't do at this stage.

[johnsom5]

The reason why we need to not charge the customer up front for our products is because there are times when there may be a 3 week lead time before the product is shipped.

It would not be fair to tie up a customer's account for that amount of time before shipping their product.

Is there another way to handle this besides offline transactions?

We don't want to deal with the liability of being in possession of our customer's CC information, so we need to have transactions go soley through Authorize.net.

What about using the quoting system to generate an "order" on our end and then we turn it into a billable invoice at time of shipping?

What would we do if a customer orders multiple items, some being shippable immediately but some items needing to be custom built and therefor having a 3-week lead time?

Is there a way to split an order up so that partial shipments/billing can be done?

What about the pre-order function? - Not sure how that works even though I did some searching online.

I know there are a lot of questions, but my site is live as of this last weekend and I didn't expect to come into this snag in our business.

I wouldn't have gone live if I knew this going in.

Our old site was built using Authorize.net as a gateway, and orders through that site can be captured later at time of shipping.

It's very upsetting that BC cannot do this also.

[Liam Dilley]

You can always run quoting first, so the orders come in and you can process. You can then set your order status to have "finalise payment" which notifies the customer and has a custom formed link to the payment form which has a paramater in the URL for the order ID and you can have a form to take payment for that order auto populating in the ID.

[johnsom5]

The quote system could work, but I've been told that there will end up being a bottle neck at the time of shipping.

Since no credit card would have been authorized prior to getting the order ready to ship, we would have to wait for the customer to respond to the email to submit their CC info.

This also creates an extra step for the customer, thus increasing the possibility of not converting the order into a paid sale. (I guess I can't keep accounting happy unless they get what BC doesn't offer).

So, we're going to have to settle for processing as an offline payment for now until I can find out how to integrate our site with our Chase Paymentech account using API somehow.

Never done that before so don't know what to expect, but hopefully it's possible.

[AJMead]

For the record, I wasn't able to find a work-around for this issue.  We were early enough in the process that I was able to go with another eCommerce solution provider for this client.  I am using BC now only for non-eCommerce sites or for more basic eCommerce sites.

[Brad Lawryk]

There may be a way to do it within your gateway interface. For example I can set my Moneris to do the transaction but not process it until I process it manually. But this setting is in my Gateway settings not the BC settings.

I am not familiar with how Authorize.net works though but have a look for something like that. Unfortunately it is an all or nothing solution though. If that is set then all transactions are set to have to be manually processed.

[AJMead]

Thank you, Brad.  I will look more closely into whether this is possible with Authorize.net using their admin interface.  I assumed it had to be done at the API level, but perhaps there is another way.