Affordable, seamless way to Extend Authorizations > 7 Days?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
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Topic summary

A merchant on a legacy Shopify Basic plan ($109/mo) needs credit card authorizations longer than the default 7 days to accommodate build-to-order products with 4–6 week lead times. An arbitrarily long window is preferred; 30 days would help but may still be insufficient.

Shopify Plus is not viable due to cost ($2,300/mo after the initial period). The merchant explored “card vaulting” apps (securely store card, authorize/charge later) but found most are geared to try-before-you-buy, out-of-stock, or coming-soon flows, not a seamless default checkout.

Desired flow: customers complete standard checkout; their card is vaulted by default; authorization and capture occur only when the order is ready to ship. Because inventory isn’t linked to Shopify, the merchant wants this behavior for all orders.

Risk of failed charges is acceptable (90% of customers are government or prime contractors). Current processor: Authorize.net (unclear relevance).

Status: seeking an affordable, seamless solution on Shopify Basic; no resolution yet.

Summarized with AI on December 12. AI used: gpt-5.
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We are currently on a legacy Shopify Basic plan at $109/month, and the default authorization period for credit cards is 7 days.

While some of our products ship within 7 days, we often build-to-order, with a lead time of 4-6 weeks, so while 30 days would be nice, an arbitrarily long period would be much better.

Shopify Plus is $2300/month after the initial period, so that’s just not possible for a tiny company like ours.

I’ve read up on “card vaulting” apps that securely store the CC number without performing an auth, which then allows an arbitrary amount of time before authorizing and charging, which is good, but they all (almost all?) seem to work as a “try before buy” or “out of stock” or “coming soon” feature, which is not good.

I want to have the deferred auth/charge as a seamless default, so that every customer proceeds through the standard checkout, and then gets their card vaulted until we’re ready to ship and charge.

Yes, I know that deferring the auth could cause problems with failed charges at ship time, but that’s not a big problem for us, because 90% of our customers are either government or government prime contractors, so declined authorizations just aren’t an issue for us.

We don’t link our inventory with Shopify, so there’s no way for the store to know what will ship within 7 days and what will not, which is why I want all orders to default to the vault and auth later.

Our payments processor is authorize.net, if that matters, but I don’t think it does.

Thanks!

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With Stripe, when you receive payments using payment methods that support subscriptions (for orders with a value of 0 or higher), you can save the customer’s payment method to Stripe for later payment collection. This is only possible with third-party solutions; see Stripe Checkout & Subscriptions for Shopify.

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