How To Process A Payment Without Knowing The Final Amount To Be Charged? [closed]

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I operate a Dry Cleaning & Laundry delivery business. When client's place an order for Laundry, the customers are charged on a per pound basis AFTER their laundry has been cleaned. As a result, this creates a payment processing issue for me as the payment processors I have been in touch with tell me that I need to pre-authorize a set amount for each client when they place an order and then invoice them if they go over that amount after the cleaning has been done. From your experience, is there a way to do the following:

1. Have a customer fill out a registration/sign up form on your website (e.g. collect customer name, address, credit card information). Please note that I do not need to see the credit card information, I just need to be able to charge it later on.
2. Facilitate a customer order (e.g. pick-up my laundry tomorrow at 6pm from my house).
3. Charge the customer the full amount they owe you AFTER you drop off their clean laundry

A similar company, Washio, is using the exact same process I described above, but I don't know how they're doing it.

Can anyone please provide an answer to my dilemma?

Answer 1

Stripe has a great in-built system for capturing data as a "customer" and a "card", which can then be processed at any time after the fact.

There's no guarantee your customer will have available credit on their card, but you can capture & verify their information without charging any amount.

This happens on Stripe's servers (and not stored on your own) so you're PCI-compliant out of the box, as long as your transaction occurs behind an SSL secured connection.

Answer 2

You do a AUTH_ONLY (Authorization Only) for the maximum amount you think the payment will be. This will freeze that amount on the customer's credit card (note, this means those funds are not available to the customer until you capture them or release them so do not do an arbitrary large amount).

When it is time to make a payment you would do a CAPTURE the sale by sending an a mount less than or equal to the amount secured using the AUTH_ONLY. If the amount is less than the amount initialing frozen the remaining funds would be released.