What is pre-authorisation?
Pre-authorisation is also known as deferred payments or deferred processing. When shoppers place an order from your site, pre-authorisation reserves the funds against the credit or debit card used, rather than taking full payment immediately as with full-authorisation – the processing and payment are deferred until such time as you (the merchant) manually complete the transaction. Shoppers will make their purchases from your web site in the normal way – your use of the deferred payments system is totally invisible to the shopper. You then have about 5 days in which to manually complete the transaction. During this time you can carry out anti-fraud checks, order more stock, contact the shopper to confirm the order, or anything else you need to do.
