A rental business owner seeks a way to automatically charge late fees, damage fees, or non-return penalties against held card details without collecting an upfront deposit. The challenge is that Shopify’s standard preauthorization only allows capturing the original rental amount, not additional charges.
Suggested workarounds include:
Partial.ly: Can charge additional fees at later dates but cannot do temporary card authorizations. Customers pay full rental price upfront and agree to potential future charges for damages/late returns.
Split it: Supports temporary authorizations but cannot charge above the authorized amount. Would require holding the rental price plus maximum potential fees upfront, then only charging what’s needed.
Subscription apps (e.g., Seal Subscriptions): A creative workaround where a subscription is created behind the scenes and swapped with a “penalty fee” product if needed. This introduces customer confusion due to subscription language appearing at checkout.
Key limitations: No ideal solution exists within Shopify’s native capabilities. Storing payment info directly raises PCI compliance and legal concerns requiring consultation with accountants and lawyers. The discussion remains open with participants still seeking better alternatives.
Summarized with AI on November 2.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
I have tried scouring the internet for this answer.
Is it possible to hold preauthorised card details to potentially charge customers at a later date a late/damage/non-returns fee for my rental business. I would like the charge to the automatic against the card details held. I am not interested in charging a deposit up-front. I also understand manually capturing preauthorised payment methods on Shopify only allows you to capture what is the original rental price, not any other additional amounts.
Deposits/Escrow are the answer on shopify with general payment gateways such as shopify-payments.
Subscriptions might also be another answer but a weird one that I’ve need seen used for this, keeping in mind customers can just cancel subscriptions.
Otherwise you need to find a gateway that allows this behavior and integrate it if you do not want to be storing such info yourself.
I think the chargeover gateway can do this but no idea of the shopify integration minutiae.
Even researching it is difficult as you’ll find alot of results will be for the fee-schedule for those services they charge you for different situations, or will be about real-estate(aka “rent”) ; and have to prune those out.
I’d reach out to some of the booking apps for shopify and ask them about this use case if they can recommend a provider.
There’s also having their payment info directly on file in your documentation to create draft orders and then charge it buuuut… > which means collecting that info outside of checkout > which means having airtight right to charge it > which immediately moves all of this into PCI compliance and legal territories > which are not discussions for a forum but should be had with a regional accountant and a lawyer, and brought up directly with shopify support to have everything nice and documented.
A response found that I’m forwarding in case someone needs this gem:
Hey Liz! Look into the below apps:
Partial.ly
Split it
In a nutshell: Partial.ly can charge additional fees at later dates, but can’t do temporary CC authorization. So in the case of my client’s dress rental business, the customer would pay the full price of the dress rental when checking out, and - at time of checkout - sign an agreement that confirms the terms under which any late fees and/or damage fees would be charged once the dress is returned.
Split it, on the other hand, can do temporary CC authorizations, but cannot charge for anything above what that authorization amount is. So, in the example of the dress rental, if a dress cost $200 to rent and the damage/late fee is $100, there would be a temporary hold of $300 and - if the dress is returned on time and without damages - they would only be charged the $200 price.
Ultimately, partial.ly worked better for my client’s needs because the damage fees and late fees vary significantly item to item.
Hope that’s helpful and feel free to share with the thread if you’d like!
I’ve been looking for it and I can’t find it.
I’ve seen another rental business in my area charges like a dollar as preauthorising amount, but I can’t figure it out the app she is using.
I would just Google Partial.Ly as it is now an external app. One of their customer service agents will assist you in integrating it with your store. Would recommend!
Any updates on this? The info seems to be outdated/incomplete. This thread says that Partial.Ly is “a payment plan service and cannot put a hold on cards.”
Also looking for a way to charge a card later, in case the customer doesn’t return the rented product
I haven’t found any “good” solutions unfortunately. The one we are experimenting with now is to use subscriptions as a workaround. Basically, we create a subscription behind the scenes when they purchase the product, and swap the product with a separate “penalty fee” product. Our policies describe this potential charge, but don’t call it a subscription. It does introduce difficulties with not confusing the customers with the subscription language which then starts popping up on the checkout page when there is a subscription present. It’s a bit of a headache. I wish there was a better option.
We’re currently using Seal Subscription app for this. Reach out to them for further guidance