Preauthorised Payment Lifespan

[Highlander]

Today we had a chargeback from an American card supplier on the basis that the Preauthorisation had expired. This is the first!

This creates a massive potential problem for us as most of our goods are made to order and rarely ship out in under the 5-10 days that a Preauthorisation is valid. This would suggest that we have two options.

The first is not to preauthorise - but just charge the whole amount on order - which HSBC say they will not approve.

The second is to take payments manually. This is impractical - entering all the customer details on the HSBC site is a nightmare.

The cost implications in time alone are frightening.

Any ideas?

[stampingmad]

I don't have any real experience of PSP (we avoided it because we often have to back order and didn't want to take full payments with order) but would it be easier to have a card terminal installed. We manually process payments through the moto function (card number, expiry date, amount) which is reasonably painless unless you are dealing in high volumes of transactions.

Helen