Option to "pend" customer payments to allow time for confirmation before final processing?

[Karnaluks]

I'm an employee at a company considering whether PayPal would be the right payment tool for our website. Right now, when someone orders from our website we manually confirm that everything they ordered is available. Because of this we do not ask for the client's payment information until we've contacted them directly. It's a fairly common occurance that we need to ask the customer to change their order after they've placed it; this normally happens due to the customer ordering more than we have in stock.

With all that said, we'd like to start taking orders outside of the EU, and are considering using PayPal to make this process convenient and secure for our customers. From my current understanding, once a customer chooses to make a payment through PayPal the transaction takes place immediately. In our case we would prefer to have payments first go into a "pending" state and not charge the client until we confirm on our end that we can completely fulfill the order. This would prevent having to issue refunds to clients.

I saw that there's the option to send invoices to clients, but I wanted to check if there were any other solutions that PayPal provides that might meet our needs?

[DPCreations]

I think the only option would be have an internal program to do an evaluation of availability before the customer places the order.  eVen with a basic eCommerce web site that I use inventory is checked before the customer can select the item.  It really needs to be part of your internal automated process before the cart goes to checkout.

[Karnaluks]

Thanks for the response!

I personally agree with your recommendation, but this would more-or-less be a complete rehaul of how the company does business as it's a mom and pop shop that's grown to be something more over the course of 20 years. For now we're looking for a solution that's good enough to bridge the gap.