Taking Deposits or Part Payment

[paulbeckett]

Hi

I plan to sell a range of products on my site where I would like to take part payment (a.k.a a deposit).

The product will cost £160 - and I would like to display this price on screen - however initially I would like to take, say, £50. And then take the remainder over the phone weeks later once the order is available.

I only want to do this for selected products. Is this possible?

[Highlander]

Deposit

We have done this for a while but we asked for the full amount to be preauthorised.

So for instance a bespoke item would be ordered. We advise client that we take half on commitment (ie work commences) and half on delivery.

We go to bank payment site and make partial shipment against the pre-authorised funds. We go to order processing and show that we have received a partial payment.

This works fine - but you should be aware that there are VAT implications and, unless you are using a simplified percentage turnover scheme, the extra work may not be worth the cash flow gained.

[paulbeckett]

Thanks.

If I have understood you correctly - you take the customer's details and manually key this information in?

Also - thanks for the heads up about VAT I will look into this.

It looks like I can't automate the process so I may just direct the customer to call my helpline - and then take details over the phone and then use the partial payment facility on the manual ordering system.

[paulbeckett]

Hi

Just replying to this to see if anyone else has any awareness of whether it is possible to take part payments online.

I suspect not:

Instead I will replace the add to cart button with a button that allows the customer to enter their order and then we will call them back - then complete the order in the Actinic back end.

[TraceyHand]

Will you be ALWAYS taking a part payment or is it an option (i.e customer can select to pay a depost or payment in full?)
I only ask because I had a similar set up with Chariots On Hire where an option would show so many month's hire (and so they selected that hire period and were given a total cost for that period ) but they only paid for the first months hire plus shipping (follow me?)
If it is a customer option, we used components with an attribute for hire period and choices being duration (I apologise if my terminology isn't great, I didn't come up with it myself, I'm only just learning components!)
You could have one choice for full payment and another for part-payment (you can then edit the actual amount charged in the component settings)
I guess you oculd do the same for one option (part-payment only) but I'm not sure how this would look from a design point of view.
If part-payment is the ONLY option, I don't see why you couldn't just have the product price set as the part-payment amount and include the total price in the product title or something?
Sorry if this is waffly. I may be able to clarify a bit if I know if it might help!
(mush-brain half-term holidays!)
Tracey

[jont]

If you are processing the credit cards manually in-house you could try adding a component against each product with the HTML name to say "£50.00 charged upon order - balance on delivery". This would then let the customer see they are paying the full £160.00 at the bottom of their order and there is then no need to spend time contacting them again for the balance.

[paulbeckett]

For this particular product I will always be taking a deposit.

So it looks like the best thing to do is create "two products" for each product. The first being the online £50 deposit which the customer can purchase automatically and the second the £110 remainder which I can process offline once the order is ready.

Paul

[yorkiebloke]

hi there if you have not sorted the problem by now, i had the same problem, what i do is give the customer the option to pay in full or pay a deposit before they add to cart, when there product is ready for dispatched i call them to arrange delivery and then take the rest of there payment over the phone and manually enter them in my PDQ machine.

Colin

[wjcampbe]

If you are using Protx as your PSP the a pre-auth transaction will allow you to do this. The customer would place the order as normal and a check would be made on availability of the full £160, the address, postcode and cvv2 details are checked, then a reversal is sent to the customer's bank (some banks ignore this reversal, unfortunately).

You can immediately do a repeat transaction for the £50 deposit from your VSP terminal and it will process again in full, but this time the money will be taken from the card and paid to your account.

At the time of dispatch, you can bring the transaction back up in your VSP terminal and do a repeat transaction for the balance of £110, and get a response from their bank before despatching the goods. The £110 would then be taken from the card and paid to your account.

[TraceyHand]

Bill,
I'm assuming from that then that Protx takes the full £160 reversed transaction as the "original transaction"?
Just knowing that you cannot do a repeat for more than the original transaction, this always prvented me from being able to work it this way (not using pre-auth) as the deposit was always too small to enable me to make a repeat for the balance, IYSWIM!

[wjcampbe]

Bill,
I'm assuming from that then that Protx takes the full £160 reversed transaction as the "original transaction"?
Just knowing that you cannot do a repeat for more than the original transaction, this always prvented me from being able to work it this way (not using pre-auth) as the deposit was always too small to enable me to make a repeat for the balance, IYSWIM!

Tracey, you are working with incorrect information.

You CAN do a repeat for more than the original transaction. Indeed, you could do a repeat against the same card every month if required - for a subscription service, say.

I have found the repeat process fairly painless (just log on, go to the list of recent transactions and click the repeat button against the correct one), though I imagine it would not be a good option for sites with thousands of orders per week, it suits my small operation down to the ground.

[chris ashdown]

I agree with bill, we do the same and pre-aut all our sales, for larger special orders we take 50% on order and the rest on dispatch, for all other orders we just take payment on dispatch

Its a bit of a pain going in to protx to get the dosh but with the original order date shown on the invoice its quick, the only real problem we find is protx only shows 7 days records at once so you have to keep entering new start and end dates for slow orders

[TraceyHand]

ooooh, wonder why I thought you couldn't repeat for more than the original then? Must be losing it.
Thanks for educating me this morning, Bill..
That's very useful information!