Pre-authorization (auth)
Two-step payments involve the pre-authorization (holding) of the customer's funds in his own bank account to ensure further payment. Completion of the payment process requires one of the following actions:
- Payment capture , when pre-authorized funds are debited from the customer's account to your account.
OR
- Voiding pre-authorization , when the funds are unblocked and become available to the customer again.
The advantage of two-step payment is that you have the ability to cancel the payment before it is actually made (debiting the funds from the customer's account), which reduces the costs of the commission that could be incurred if it is necessary to issue a refund for the payment.
Two-step payment use-case:
A customer created a cart of goods on your website and made a payment (funds are being reserved for pre-authorization). You check the availability of the ordered product/the possibility of providing the ordered service:
Scenario 1: You have verified the possibility of fulfilling the customer’s order and you are performing a capture - the payment is complete, the customer's funds have been debited.
Scenario 2: You discover that the product is out of stock, you perform void - the payment process is interrupted, so you do not need to refund the customer and bear additional fees.
Note: the above processes can be configured in such a way that the capture or void will occur automatically after a certain period in days, hours, etc. For example, if you haven't made a capture within 24 hours after making pre-authorization, void will occur and the funds become available to the customer again.
Primary two-step payment pre-authorization transactions have the type "Auth" and are displayed with this value in the merchant portal.
Two-step payment is supported only when using card payment methods as well as Apple Pay and Google Pay™ digital wallets.
Note: primary payments (purchase, auth, credit, lookup, P2P) must have a unique order ID. In case the selected order ID is already set for another transaction, an error will be received when creating the order.