Managing Pre-Payments on orders with multiple shipments

We struggle with this as well.  Our best solution has been to either mark CC orders as ship complete, or capture the full amount when we create the order.  I’m hoping later versions of handle this better--perhaps leaving the prepayment open to the full amount of the authorization or when the order is completed, whichever comes first.

Are you using Acumatica Payments (Fortis)?

​@lairdtim We unfortunately can’t ship complete because we ship items from multiple warehouses. It could also be a couple months before a product ships out because we do custom orders. So, we don’t want to charge the customer the full amount and ship their item months later.

We are currently on Auth.net looking into other processors right now.

At least that means it’s more of an Acumatica issue than a specific payment processor.  And that’s good, because we can all rally together for a fix.

Hi,

This is a bigger issue than you may realize.  The easy fix is if you can have Acumatica capture the credit card token and save the card for later use.  Authorize.net does this as do other processors like Fortis/Acumatica payments.  If your order is set for prepay and you capture only part of the preauth, the order will move to payment pending any you can reauthorize it before releasing you backorder.  If for some reason the card does not reauthorize, you get a heads up not to ship and then you can call your customer for other payment methods.

But there are sticky points.  If you are using Commerce Edition and the connector to Shopify, Shopify will not allow the credit card token to move through the connector.  They want to get all the credit card fees themselves.  Many of us have been fighting this for months with no success as of this post.

​@jharsh Being able to re-authorize the same card is dependent on whether the customer allows us to save it or not. We use BigCommerce so the customer chooses if they want the card saved or not. (We don’t have the issue of tokenized cards being unable to sync. That seems quite frustrating.) When we partially ship and use that pre-payment against the partial shipment/ invoice, it does not keep the remaining funds authorized. It simply captures less than the authorization and then closes out the pre-payment. We basically have to start fresh with a new pre-payment when proceeding with the 2nd shipment.

Although, that’s “solved” if the customer saved their card. We feel it’s not really best practice to then go ahead and re-authorize a client’s card without their knowledge a month or whatever timeframe later when the backordered items are ready to ship. Ideally, the originally pre-authorization/ pre-payment would capture anything that shipped and leave the remaining open as authorized and then we can re-auth if it expires by the time we ship or just capture the remaining. But, this way, it is still only tied to one transaction in Auth.net and one pre-payment in Acumatica.

Hi,

I completely understand, thanks. 

We actually migrated from Big Commerce to Shopify in 2024 and then discovered that they did not pass the token.   Uggg!

When on Big Commerce we did have customers save their credit card and passed the token down knowing the risks when we discovered exactly what you did about the reauthorization.  Being a mostly B2B vendor most of our customers preferred to keep a credit card on file anyway so we just did it across the board.

Now on Shopify we just capture the whole order amount at the start and if we run over the technically 30 day guideline from the FTC,  we call the customer to see what they want to do.  By the way, trying to refund a credit cards back through the Shopify connector is not an easy process either so sometimes the grass if not always greener. :)

Best of luck and stay in touch!

John

​@jharsh John- Thanks so much for the reply. So interesting to hear your perspective on this. We just launched BigCommerce. But, battled with whether BigCommerce was the best solution over Shopify after experiencing many struggles during implementation. Seems like each one has its perks and battles. We are mostly B2B too, so we tend to fall where you guys did with saving credit cards and managing that way for now.

Would love to stay in touch and good luck to you guys too!

-Courtney

Ha!

We launched Bigcommerce with the Bundle B2B before they became part of BC.  So lots of bugs to work out.  We moved because BC just did not produce many of the things they promise in a timely fashion.  

With all fairness I believe BC by now has improved the B2B a lot and now maybe a bit easier to work with as a much smaller group than Shopify.

I would be hard pressed to pick one over the other right now given our experience.  Either way is still takes a lot of work and often work arounds to get the level of customer service we all want.

But after all, that is why we have jobs!

jharsh@gesswein.com

Hi ​@courtneyb were you able to find a solution? Thank you!

​@Chris Hackett No good solution. The only way we are able to handle this right now is to capture the funds on the credit card before we ship (which is not our standard practice). But, if the order is backordered, we end up having to call the customer if they didn’t save their credit card to their profile and retake the payment upon shipping out the backordered items. Would love to see functionality for this added in Acumatica for the future.