Delayed billing?

[Conficio]

Hi there,

I'm looking to evaluate osCommerce for my e-shop and have a question:

 

Is it possible to have a process of proposal of may be several days, before the credit card is actually billed?

 

Here is my issue. I sell some design dependent products, that need customization. I want people to order and give me information regarding the customizing they want to have. I want to offer them the customized version for approval and bill them only when they approved the stuff. Think of embroidered products and the approval porcess of the design.

 

Has anyone done this before?

 

Would I be able to reserve the purchase amount on the credit card and commit the sale a few days later?

 

Can I hold a shopping cart in such a limbo state until the commit arrives? What would that do to my resources? What happens if the server goes down, are the shopping carts preserved?

 

Thanks for your answers and advice

K<o>

[doubleforte]

did anyone have a solution to this? I need something similar for an upcoming project.

 

brian

[Conficio]

Hi there,

I have dipped a little deeper into osCommerce in the mean time.

 

There is a process of walking orders through states. These states are progressing by the interaction of the store owner.

 

I guess one could extend the number of states to add things like "in preparation", "in design", "for review", "payed".

 

However, I could not find out, if I could make some sort of reservation on the credit card for up to a week or so and finalize the purchase, once the design is approved.

 

Another approach I was thinking of, is to run the "requests for proposal" through the regular store and keep a second system, to fulfill the orders til payment. Exporting the order from the first store and importing it into the second (fulfillment) store.

 

Good luck, and may be some brave sole with experience can help us out with our questions.

[AlanR]

Hi there,

FYI:

 

Your signature violates forum rules:

 

Commercial Postings

 

Commercial advertising is not allowed in the forums.

 

Spamming of any kind, either publicly or privately via PM or e-mail, is not tolerated, and will result in an instant ban of the account involved.

 

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?act=boardrules

[djs]

There are several ways to do this.

1. Capture the card information, and then process the card via a terminal only after the bid is accepted. This has a risk of having credit card numbers stored on your server.

 

2. Set your system to authorize but not capture the funds. This puts a hold on the funds on the card, but will not transfer the money. When you finalize the deal, log in and capture the funds. I think most merchant accounts will time out an authorization after a fixed period, so be careful of that, though it's probably 30 days (check your account, don't take anyone elses word for this).

 

3. If the price is negotiated, sell a 'bid' for $0, and then submit the proposal and recieve payment after the fact.

 

#2 is probably the most efficient manner.

 

Dan

[Conficio]

Hi there

Signatures

 

To keep user profiles consistent, links to external sites must be presented via the WWW button.

 

Links to internal osCommerce pages are allowed to be entered in profile signatures (eg, links to the Wiki site, the contributions, etc.)

 

Profiles, including signatures, with innappropriate content may be modified without prior notification.

Can someone help me to understand this, please? I didn't mean to violate the forum rules. But honestly I don't know what is within the rules and what is out.

 

Here are my specific questions:

• What is the WWW button?
  
• What is inappropriate content in the signature?
  

I believe a link to my business is helpful in understanding my background and helps to find answers to my questions. I have also never been accused of a one liner being SPAM. however, I might be wrong here.

 

Is a moderator around, that could review my signature and give me some ideas how to modify it in order to comply? If you like you can send me a private message.

 

Kind regards

K<o>

[Conficio]

Thanks Dan,

that is very helpful information. I will head your advice and ask my merchant account regarding the time out period. 30 days should be enough for my purposes.

 

I'll also see if I can somehow encrypt the credit card information for security.

 

Thanks again

K<o>

[theman]

is it possible to do this with paypal?

[Conficio]

Hi theman,

you might want to ask that at PayPal support, if they support "authorizing" funds w/o capturing them.

 

I guess that would be difficult, as PayPal has multiple sources of funds, from cash balances to credit cards and draft from checking accounts.

 

K<o>

P.S.: Can you report back to us, if you get an answer from PayPal?