My company, for which I support our credit card processing software, is currently doing $1 authorizations for free-trial orders to 'ping' the card, then ending the transaction batch with an authorization void. We'd like instead to be using zero-amount authorizations, introduced as I understand it by Visa in 2009 as a so-called account verification, relieving us of the need to void the authorization. Importantly, this would also relieve us of some small amount of charges for 'authorization abuse' in cases where the authorization void fails for one reason or another and doesn't get cleared in a timely fashion.
I know that zero-amount authorizations are accepted by the Payflow gateway, at least in transactions I've run through the test endpoint. My question is whether this technique is supported for live transactions for all of the four credit card types we support: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover.
Thanks,
Tom
