AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I had an interesting phone call with PayPal yesterday. We had a few orders that were authorized and when we shipped and then captured the payment, the result was a failed transaction. I called PayPal to see what the issue was because the Authorization was still valid and they said that the customer's credit card company was declining the charge and they could do nothing about it. We had shipped the merchandise because we had a clean transaction authorization and now we have no money for these orders.

Luckily the were small orders, but this could potentially be a big issue for us. I asked PayPal what the process was for charging cards. It was my understanding that as the merchant, we must ship the customers items prior to capturing funds. Three people who I spoke to at PayPal (1 who was a supervisor) said that they recommend we capture the funds prior to shipping anything because of this type of scenario. I've never heard of this. So I'm curious, what do others out there do? Yes, I can see how it would be much safer for our company to charge the cards prior to shipping but we've never had a system that would do that in the past (although I can think of a way we might be able to set this up in Able Commerce). We also use Authorize.net and have never had any issues with Authorizations not going through. Maybe we're just spoiled.

This is our first season of using PayPal for authorizing payments and this was the first set of orders that this has happened on. 3 orders within 2 days. I'm now manually charging the orders prior to shipping for PayPal, but don't feel good about it because the order isn't even picked and packed and ready to ship yet. They will go out, but this is a lot of extra work for something that seems like it shouldn't even be possible. Why bother authorizing funds if the authorization isn't going to be valid? Again, I'm curious what others workflows are and how they handle this type of situation.

Wil

This is odd because a couple of years ago Paypal was saying don't capture the payment until you ship. If the customer's card was declined because of anything other than an address or security code, the authorization code wouldn't have been generated. In authorizenet, if you get an authorization code, you can go back and capture the transaction using that, even though it might have been declined because of your business rules.
Maybe this was a freak incident where they locked the customer's account before you captured the money.

When it happened on one transaction, I thought it was a freak thing and was just going to hope it didn't happen again. However, on the same day it happened again and then again on the following day. Three times in two days is too much for us. It's definitely not on our end either because I manually attempted the captures and they still failed. Plus we had dozens of other good PayPal transactions go through in the same time period.

Surprisingly, the PayPal method has made up a lot of the sales we've received this year. Our customers seem to like it, probably because of all the protection it gives them. It has been a major hindrance in our workflow though with all the special attention it needs to be given. This just adds to the pile. The weird thing too is that I thought maybe these failures were due to the fact that the items had been backordered for a while and maybe we were close to the expiration of the authorization, but 2 of the 3 had been authorized 2 days prior to the capture.

Wil

I might have given wrong information. I thought you meant you were using Paypal to process your charge cards also and the customer would just select the charge card type at checkout and not know it was going thru Paypal's system.