How can I delay charging for pre-order items in my toy store?

[crazycollecting]

Hello, I hope you are having an amazing day!!! My situation is a little bit complicated, but I am hoping you can help. So for my toy store, I offer a lot of both In-Stock Items and Pre-Order Items. I am looking for a way to only process the payment for In-Stock items and not charge my customers credit card for any of the Pre-Order items within their order until these items are ready to be fulfilled x number of months down the road. My ultimate goal of why I am reaching out is I am looking for help on how I can store my customers Credit Card info within their order, and I can charge their card when everything is in stock and ready to ship x number of months later, while only charging the In-stock items today. I don't want to have to reach out to the customer for their credit card information when everything's ready to ship. For the overall look of the products page, I still need the Pre-Order button along with a note of when everything is expected to arrive. One example of a shopify store that has this type of Payment method is called dorksidetoys.com. So I know its possible, but I need help figuring this out 🙂

[Dirk]

Hey, @crazycollecting 

Is there a particular reason to hold off on capturing the payment? This does have some potential downsides as it can cause customer frustration. For example, seeing a charge on their credit card after a long period of time and forgetting about the item they pre-ordered in the past.

There aren't any apps that I know that allows you to hold off payment for a significant period of time. When a customer places an order online, the order goes through a payment authorization period. Which is the length of time a merchant has to capture the payment on the credit card until the order expires. The length of which depends on which payment gateway you've chosen. For example, with Shopify Payments this period is 7 days long so you could put the product up for pre-order one week before the product would be ready. You could use a regular pre-order app such as Pre-Order Manager, and then capture payments manually within that seven-day timeframe.

If you needed the period to be longer than this, you could set the product at zero dollars and then invoice the customer via a draft order when you're ready to send it out. Another option would be to have the customer fill in a form to express interest in the product and then later invoice them for it later via a draft order as well.

If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know.

[evaldas_92]

In some countries, particularly EU it's illegal to capture payment until you have proof of intent to ship.

So if you sell preorder items with longer lead time, such as made to order items or rare/collectibles, then you'd want to hold on to the authorization for longer.

Common payment gateways in Europe will let you hold authorization for up to 1-5 years. Not saying it's best for the customer, but certainly enables business use cases.

Holding authorization for 7 days barely accounts for preordering in my opinion 😊