Community Support Forums

Hi,

I'm researching merchant account solutions for a client. I set up s2member on their website and purchased the upgrade. I am making sure that I suggest the best solution that fits their needs. They need to be able to authorize the card and capture the payment later via either s2member or their merchant account login.

Which of the following payment gateways allow us to do this while using s2member basic / pro, if any?

PayPal® Pro
PayPal® Standard
Google® Checkout
Authorize.Net®
ClickBank®
AliPay®
ccBill® Compatible

Thanks in advance!

Elise

Hi Elise,

Can you explain what you mean by "capture the payment later"?

This feature is typically used for retail companies where they have to authorize the card but not actually charge it until the product is shipped. So they ship the product then log in to their merchant account to finish the process, aka "capture" the credit card purchase.

Most gateways have this capability but it depends on the software settings that interact with the gateways - ie., Paypal Pro has this capability but s2member would have to "tell" paypal just to authorize the membership fee, not charge it. I believe some other gateways can "force" this capability per the account settings, but I'm not sure and would have to log in to each gateway provider (and I don't have access to all kinds) to check. I thought it'd be easier to ask here.

For this client's situation in particular, they have to approve the member application before charging the card, they don't accept just any member registration, and I thought the simplest way to make this possible is to just pre-authorize and then charge the card using the same technique that retailers shipping products use.

I can imagine that some other S2member customers would need this for retail purposes - ie,. if becoming a member means they get a kit shipped to them... by law they would be required not to actually charge the card until the kit is shipped.

Hi Elise.

Sorry, but s2Member doesn't support this. It wasn't designed to deal with this kind of retail situation. s2Member is not a shopping cart, it's function is managing access to content in WordPress.

I'm afraid it may not be what you're looking for to offer your client.

Hi,

I wanted to follow up saying that I have found that with some gateways it IS possible because you can set the payment processing settings to "force" authorize only. Whether this will cause a bug in S2member or not, will need to test.

I have not been able to test with all gateways, but I can say that with Paypal, it is not possible. With Google Checkout, it is possible, I have checked and it works, but it doesn't auto return the user to the website to complete registration. Not sure if this is standard or not.

Next, I will test with an authorize.net integrated gateway and report back the results here.

Cool. Looking forward to your updates.