Payment Pre-Authorizations

Some electronic transactions may be required to have the card validated at the bank level before the card can be stored in Advanced Billing. We call this pre-authorization. When a credit card is added to a Subscription within Advanced Billing, the card must be validated before it can be attached to a Subscription. This protects both you and the consumer:

You, as the merchant, should protect your account from false signups with bogus card. Pre-authorization protects you from this by validating the card.
Your subscribers are protected from a negative shopping experience by allowing only valid cards to be entered into the Advanced Billing platform.

Note that if an amount is due when a card is stored, such as at signup, or when updating the card on a past due or unpaid subscription, then a separate pre-authorization will not be done.

Authorization amount

Transactions initiated with a debit card or credit card are assesssed either a $0.00 or $1.00 authorization. This is not a charge, but it may be visible to the customer before it is reversed. In the case of debit cards, authorization holds can fall off the account, thus rendering the authorization amount available again, anywhere from 1 to 8 business days after the transaction date depending on the bank’s policy. In the case of credit cards, holds may last as long as 30 days, depending on the issuing bank.

Turn Off Authorization

We or the gateway will always authorize a card in some way when it is added to Advanced Billing, whether by sending an explicit auth request or allowing a subsequent payment to implicitly validate it. That said, there are a select set of gateways where this authorization setting can be turned off:

Authorize.Net
Bambora/Beanstream
NMI

Please be aware that turning off authorizations may increase the number of declines within your site.

Sites with the Multi-Gateway feature enabled

This setting can be managed under the Payment Gateways tab individually for each of the aforementioned gateways:

Sites without the Multi-Gateway feature enabled

This setting can be managed under the Settings tab –> Payment Gateways: