MY customer is deducted twice in his account

Brickyard
Contributor
Contributor

 Customer places an order on our store and chooses paypal for payment.  

Our setting in the store is not to capture credit card payment automatically.  We capture manually after validating that order is complete.

Uponplacing order, customer seems to have a deduction in the account already for the order amount.  

In our paypal screen, it is showing "Authorization".

So a couple of days later, we capture the amount.

Customer now notices there are two deductions to their account of the same amount.  

We only captured once. 

 

Why does customer show two deductions in their account?

 

Thanks,

 

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5 REPLIES 5

angelleye
Advisor
Advisor
The authorization showing up and holding the funds is normal. When you capture it should simply make that official and pull the money, but it wouldn't show an additional auth/capture, unless...

What are you using specifically to run the Auth and Capture procedures? It sounds like what could be happening is that you're processing the orders as an Auth, and that part is working fine. However, when you're "capturing" it's actually running a new "Sale" transaction, which ignores the previous Auth and processes a new transaction.

This would leave the Auth pending on the account (and continue holding those funds for 29 days or until the Auth is voided), and it would then also show the separate Sale transaction where the money was actually taken.

This would indeed be very frustrating for your customers, and you. Are you using a shopping cart solution of some kind? Did you have a custom solution built for this? Are you doing it through Virtual Terminal, or what exactly is going on with your flow?
Angell EYE - www.angelleye.com
PayPal Partner and Certified Developer - Kudos are Greatly Appreciated!
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Brickyard
Contributor
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We use Shopify which has a built in integration with paypal. So we didnt do any integration ourselves. We have been doing this for a year now and only recently have I seen questions from customers.
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angelleye
Advisor
Advisor
Okay, well they're a very popular platform, of course, so it's odd they would have that sort of a problem happening. Have you looked at your Shopify history? I would imagine it would give you logs of payment requests happening on your account..?? Or their support should be able to help you figure out what's going on here.
Angell EYE - www.angelleye.com
PayPal Partner and Certified Developer - Kudos are Greatly Appreciated!
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Brickyard
Contributor
Contributor

 

So i worked with Shopify and they are asking me to check with Paypal.    Their response to be is below.  In any case, is there something i can do to help my customer.  Like is there something that i could give to the bank so that they recognize that the authorization can be reversed already?  I cant have my customers debit card in this state?  So while trying to investigate, what can i provide my customer so that they can go to bank and reverse the authorization approval?

 

 

 

"Alen here from Shopify, pleased to meet you. Your gateway, PayPal Express performs both an authorization and capture on when processing orders. This is why your order timeline shows two instances. Here is the following information from PayPal;

 

Authorization and capture includes these time periods: A 29-day valid period that begins when the buyer authorizes the payment. During this period, the authorization places the buyer's balance on hold to ensure that the payment amount is available for capture. A three-day honor period, which is from day one to day three of the authorization period. After most successful authorizations, PayPal honors 100% of authorized funds during the honor period. A day starts at 12AM PST and ends at 11:59PM PST on the calendar day when the authorization occurs

 

Looking at a few orders at random, everything on our end suggest only one capture was performed.

You can contact PayPal to see if they can streamline their calls so that both the authorization and capture can happen on a single action.

Regards,

Alen V."

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angelleye
Advisor
Advisor
That info is simply incorrect, and it sounds like they don't have it properly integrated into their platform, but that would be very surprising for a platform as large as Shopify.

An authorization does indeed put a hold, and then it has be captured later as they said. You can't just call PayPal and ask them to do the calls more quickly, though. That's not how it works. It's up to the app developer to make the call to Capture an open Authorization.

If you truly have an authorization being left open then they must be running two authorizations and only capturing one of them. This is something you would see in the PayPal history, though. Are you seeing two separate authorizations in your PayPal activity log?

Angell EYE - www.angelleye.com
PayPal Partner and Certified Developer - Kudos are Greatly Appreciated!
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