How to handle pre-orders

[Chris--S]

I am working on a website for a documentary film producer.  They would like to use the website to take pre-orders for the film.  The film release is scheduled for the spring, so 3 months or more away.  What is an appropriate way(*) to handle the transaction?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

(*) Hopefully without any need to store credit card information on our server

[stymiee]

Most procesors do not allow credit cards to be charged for items that will be shipped beyond 30 days of the credit card being charged. This is due to the very high chargeback potential. So you'll want to make sure you charge the credit cards when you are ctually ready to ship.

Your best bet is to store the credit cards using Customer Information Manager (CIM) and then charging them when the orders are ready to be shipped. CIM will handle the storing of the credit card information so you don't have to. Then when it is time to process the credit card all you need to do is make the proper API call and it's done.

[tseven]

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@stymiee wrote:

Your best bet is to store the credit cards using Customer Information Manager (CIM) and then charging them when the orders are ready to be shipped. CIM will handle the storing of the credit card information so you don't have to. Then when it is time to process the credit card all you need to do is make the proper API call and it's done.

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I know this post is old, but it was the first hit in google.

Just to clarify,

In the scenario of accepting a pre-order for a product or service which may or may not be available in the future, would I be able to accept the customer's CC info to create their CIM profile, then charge them at a later date without additional approval from the customer? Is their a time constraint as to when I am able to charge the customer? Less than 30 days?

Ultimately I'd like to be able accept pre-orders for a product which will only be available if enough users purchase it. Since there is a decent chance the minimum pre-orders won't be met, I don't want to place a hold on the customers cards and have to worry about charge backs or refunds. I'd like to follow the model amazon uses, which is the customer is charged only when the product is available (this can be months later).

Can I do exactly this with CIM? Since the customer's information is stored in CIM will be able to charge it a few months later once the product is available?

Thanks in advance!

[stymiee]

Yes to all of your questions.

[PureCostumes]

We are in similar situation. In the past, we accept pre-order but we treat it as an actually order (capture orders). The only difference is we do not process the order until we have inventory and that can be months. The issue with this is customers sometime are not aware that it's a pre-order and request refund. Since it may be weeks, we have no way of processing a refund.

How do you guys handle this? Don't capture until ready to ship?

Kelvin D

Pure Costumes

[lukydesigns]

Yes, just do an auth to verify card is valid. Then capture using CIM later when ready to ship. Of course, I'd want to verify with customer that they still want the product before capture/ship.

[krafcio]

can I authorize cc for chacking if card is valid using php or just manual authorization via authorize.net website?
Will the user see that I've checked his cc?

[lukydesigns]

you can run an auth transaction using php. if you void it right after you run it, it won't show to them...I think only if it's batched does it show (not sure).

[salesmusic321]

We do the same thing for our site , we capture the sale, confirm with the customer and then once the item comes in stock we then charge the transactions. Seems to work flawlessly.

Brian