I would like to implement a guarantee payment system on a website I'm working on. By that I mean that the user would insert his credit card information but no money would be drawn from it at the moment he does so. The money could only be drawn if the client does not show up at the hotel to actually pay for it. In that case the owner should be able to get some amount back. I was looking at Braintree payments but haven't found anything in their doc mentioning a system like this. How should I go about it?
You want to do an Auth Only transaction. Auth Only transactions are very similar to Authorize & Capture transactions except the transaction is not captured. The merchant is issued a six digit authorization number indicating that the funds are available and the transaction is approved. However, the merchant will not receive those funds until they capture the transaction.
Authorizations are only valid for up to 30 days from when they are issued and for up to the amount they were authorized for. For example, if an authorization was obtained for $100, the merchant may use this authorization for any transaction up to $100 for that customer. However, they cannot go over $100 with that authorization number.
An Important thing to note is that the funds from authorizations are frozen on a customer's credit card and cannot be access by that customer. From the customer's point of view, that money is essential spent. Authorizations should not be used without a customer's consent and with care.
Authorizations are captured when a Force transaction is processed.
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I am using node and stripe. I need to a achieve a two step process.
Check that the user's payment method has sufficient funds for a specific amount.
If they do, then charge them that amount.
Else, error.
There's not really a way to do this with credit cards. However, if you are using something like ACH Debit as a payment method, you could use Financial Connections to check the account balance for sufficient funds prior to debiting the account.
Currently, I am creating payments with the Square API.
https://developer.squareup.com/explorer/square/payments-api/create-payment
This charges the customer's card for the desired amount. Is there a way to authorize a payment first without charging the card?
For our system, we need to wait a few minutes for a response from our vendor to process an order. I would like to authorize a payment, then if we get an approved response from our vendor, charge the customer's card otherwise cancel the payment.
I'm trying to avoid paying transaction fees, if we are unable to fulfill an order.
You can call CreatePayment (that you linked above) with autocomplete set to false. This will authorize the payment, but not actually take the funds out yet. By default, you have up to 6 days before the payment auto-voids, so you would want to call CompletePayment whenever you intend to complete the payment (or CancelPayment if you want to manually void the payment).
Is it possible with Stripe to perform a test transaction to ensure that an account is funded?
I would like to :
take the Credit Card ID at the moment of the booking (but no payment at that moment)
make the customer pay AFTER the service has been done
What you likely want is to place a hold on the card for the given amount, and then capture the funds later after the service has completed. When placing a hold the given amount is authorized and guaranteed by the cardholder's bank. You'll often see these types of transactions show up on your online bank statement when renting a car or when checking-in to a hotel room. When processing your payment with Stripe you would set the capture_method on the PaymentIntent to manual which tells Stripe to only authorize the given amount. Then, once the service is rendered you would capture the funds. The following guide covers the approach in detail:
https://stripe.com/docs/payments/capture-later
I'm looking for a way to charge my customer after a request was successfully accepted.
To explain it further. I'm developing a marketplace where a private seller can sell his products to private customers. But the customer can only "request" the product and only when the seller accepts his conditions a deal is made.
Now comes the question that I have. Is it possible that the user is paying for the request but is only charged when the request is accepted?
If a request fails the charge has never been done or gets a full refund (but without the loss of transactions fees).
I've seen some couple of websites that use credit cards for that case.
If you look at credit cards as a payment method they are usually a pull-based, reusable and synchronous method of payment. This means that, after capturing the customer’s card details, you can debit arbitrary amounts from the customer’s card without them having to take any additional action and there is immediate confirmation about the success or failure of a payment.
So that is why you can charge someone after a specific period of time.
But in Germany, we don't use credit cards that often. Only pushed-based transactions like Sepa/Sofort/iDeal. Would it be possible to "delay" payments with these methods?
This should be possible. I'm not sure what payment processor you are using/want to use or what is available in Germany but I assume this would be possible with many of them. Probably some useful things to search for that might be similar to what you want would be saving payment methods for later, managing subscriptions, and tokenizing credit cards.
Stripe for example allows you to save credit cards for later under a customer record and then charge a customer later. https://stripe.com/docs/saving-cards
Braintree has recurring billing https://developers.braintreepayments.com/guides/recurring-billing/overview and a vault for storing payment methods https://articles.braintreepayments.com/control-panel/vault/overview.
I am working on a software that is to be used by businesses which make about $0.5mil revenue per year. I would like to incorporate into the software the option for my users to accept card payments from their clients. So far it seems I have the following options:
Manage multiple merchant accounts on behalf of my clients, however this has a few drawbacks. I would, for example, like to charge some small fee to cover the costs (about 0.1%) which I cannot accept if the payment to my user doesn't go through some stage that I can control where I can deduct the fee and send it my way. Also, about 50% of the mentioned revenue is paid for by credit or debit cards so a volume of $250,000 might not be enough to cover the fees set by the account provider.
Send everything through a merchant account that I control and then distribute the funds to the users. This, however, seems like a very small scale solution at best with the average number of payments per user per day being around 15.
The end result should be that the user enters a price in the software, this gets sent to a card reader where the user's client inserts their card and makes the payment. The amount charged includes all the fees associated. The amount paid will then be sent to some merchant account where my fee will be sent to me and the merchant fee will be deducted, the rest will be sent to my user's account. The whole point being that the user doesn't have to bother with setting up merchant account or card reader and simply gets a card reader from us which connects to the software and can immediately accept payments.
I sincerely hope I am missing something but I would appreciate any help with finding a way how to charge clients of my users and take some small fee.
So as it turns out, the best way to do this is using Stripe after all. If anyone is ever concerned, this is how I solved the problem.
Stripe is currently rolling out Managed Accounts of their Stripe Connect which can be used to effectively manage Stripe accounts for my customers. Therefore, once a user registers for my payment program, I create a managed account for them without the user knowing at all. For incoming Stripe payments I can then use the destination property as the id of the account where the money should go and specify an application fee which will be charged to my own account.
From there on the only problem to solve is that Stripe only supports online payments which can be overcome by using for example Payworks, however so far their service has been pretty terrible so this may be a weak point in the system.