1 / 5
Feb 2008

I am implementing Google Checkout and am confused. In your instructions it tells me to set the setting for Order Processing to "Automatically authorize the buyer's credit card for the full amount of the order". My question is, why can't I select the option to have the buyers card authorized and automatically charged? Will I need to charge each manually?

  • created

    Feb '08
  • last reply

    Aug '08
  • 4

    replies

  • 1.0k

    views

  • 5

    users

We charge the orders automatically and hence the instructions tell you to select the "Authorize only" option. If you do, however, need that setting to be "Authorize and Charge" for any reason (like for non E-junkie sales), it won't cause any issues.

3 months later

What if I don't want to automatically charge a customer's credit card. Can the auto charge be turned off so I can manually do the charging from within Google Checkout. If I can't turn off the auto charge from e-junkie what other option do I have to manually charge using Google Checkout?



Should I disconnect the api to e-junkie?



Will this cause any problems?

2 months later

I am glad I found this post as I have been pulling my hair out because it has been automatically charging my customers.



I certainly do not want to automatically charge my buyers. Please let me know what it will take to stop the automatic charge.



Thanks in advanced for helping E-JunkieExpert.

As far as you and your buyers are concerned, that "authorize and charge" setting is functionally identical to the "authorize for the full amount" setting we recommend, but the former setting is only required by some other services instead of E-junkie cart and generates a bunch of meaningless error-log entries behind the scenes on our end and Google's end, which is why we recommend the latter setting in our documentation.



We know of no way to validate a buyer's payment account for an order total without also actually charging the account for that amount, but all of that happens on the payment processors' ends rather than ours, so it doesn't really concern anything at our end.



You may wish to inquire with Google, PayPal or other processors we support to see if they can put a transaction "on hold" or something similar that would verify the proper amount of funds are available and ideally also set that amount aside, but wait until you manually release the payment to actually charge the buyer's account and issue notification to our system that payment was completed, at which point we would then issue our thank-you emails with any download links.



The key issue here for our system is whether or not payment notification (IPN for PayPal, or API callback for Google) would still be sent to us after (and ONLY after) you release a payment manually, or if they'd just send us payment notification as soon as the buyer's account was validated for the order amount. In that latter case for digital products, you might as well complete payment automatically if the processor is going to trigger our issuing download links before you actually release the buyer's payment anyway.



At any rate, all of this would be a matter between you and the payment processor(s), as payments happen entirely at their end, and we do not formally support or recommend any sort of on-hold payments, so this would be up to you alone to set up without our help, and to troubleshoot if anything goes wrong.