Take card details upfront and then determine final amount later?

Hi there!

What do you think about authorizing payment for $149, and then only capturing $99 if the job is done within 2 hours?

If that works for your use case, you can make use of Authorize feature in Stripe: Does Stripe Support Authorization and Capture? – Documentation.

That’s a decent idea actually, however the $149 was kind of arbitrary at this point… (even if it will probably cover the majority of cases). But of course, if they need 3 hours of additional work at $60/hr, then the total is $279.

You can imagine a workflow like:

– Starts as a phone or email conversation
– Customer starts order by entering payment details
– Diagnostic is done
– If work can be fulfilled within the diagnostic fee, $99 is captured and all done.
– If extra work required, we check with customer for approval, if so we do the work, and then capture the total; if not approved we bill $99 for the diagnostic and the work done within the budget.

Of course one thing I could do is not bill anything upfront, and only release the repaired website once paid, but unfortunately it’s still possible that some customers will disappear without paying, even if the website isn’t fixed. Chasing customers for money is no fun.

Really I suppose I want to just hang onto their details and then if work order is approved go ahead and then bill total and send receipt. I can of course see why this is not always desirable, and doesn’t suit a lot of use cases, but in my case it actually is a good user experience for the customer and also protects me from not being paid.

It’s kind of like a hotel I guess? You give them your credit card, and then they charge you at the end for what you actually used (extra night, expensive chocolate bar from the mini fridge, etc).

Thank you for clarifying the exact workflow.

From what I understand, everything until the first $99 charge is fixed. So you can capture charge immediately for the first half.

The second part though would depend on the number of additional hours spent on the job. It is not a fixed amount, and will change almost every time.

As per my understanding, this part cannot be automated because most of the payment gateways (including Stripe) will not let you charge an amount higher than what was authorized, and in this case, we wouldn’t know beforehand the amount we’d want to authorize.

What do you think about creating a new manual order for the additional charge, setting the status to Pending Payment, and manually requesting the customer to pay for the order via email (using built-in options). Customers should still need to log-in to pay for the order.

We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.