Advice for handling credit card data

Question

I am currently building a website for a small business that requires a payment gateway (we will probably use Authorize.Net). The problem is, on many orders, there are special needs for calculating shipping and handling costs. This requires us to bill customers, instead of customers instantaneously being billed for the order.

My question is, is it possible to have Authorize.Net or related service to only store the credit card data without processing it, with us entering the billing total to be processed later?

Thanks for your input on this. All advice is welcome.

Answer 1

You can do this two ways with Authorize.Net

1. Using their AIM API you can do an AUTH_ONLY and get the funds approved and held for the amount to be charged later. The only caveat is you can only hold the funds for 30 days before they are automatically released.

2. Use their CIM API to create a payment profile for the customer. You can then charge againsty this profile whenever you need to. However, CIM is an extra service and thus you have to pay more for it.

Answer 2

We had this problem, but ended up using UPS API to get shipping. It was pretty painless. We did have to provide radio buttons for standard and expedited methods.