Payment reauthorizations
Gain a better understanding of Digital River's payment reauthorization feature and how you might use it to sell pre-ordered goods
Last updated
Gain a better understanding of Digital River's payment reauthorization feature and how you might use it to sell pre-ordered goods
Last updated
Selling pre-ordered goods or managing other delayed fulfillment types carries a higher risk of chargebacks. This is due to the often lengthy period of time between payment authorization and
If you'd like to minimize your chargeback risks, your account can be set up so that Digital River never initiates the capture and settlement process without valid authorization. However, selecting this option has potential downsides. For details, refer to Managing chargeback risks.
Although Digital River's payment reauthorization feature has other use cases, this article mainly focuses on strategies to process checkouts and fulfillments containing pre-ordered goods.
An whose moves to accepted indicates that the issuing bank has approved the transaction to proceed. However, that authorization remains valid for only a limited amount of time. If it expires before a create fulfillment request is submitted that results in Digital River attempting to fully or partially an order's , the issuing bank may initiate a late presentment chargeback.
To manage this, we can configure your account to be chargeback risk-tolerant or chargeback risk averse. The option you instruct your Digital River representative to select helps determine the balance between the frequency of chargebacks you receive and the amount of revenue you earn.
If your account is configured to be risk-tolerant, Digital River attempts to and settle using the original authorization, even when it has expired, and we cannot create a new one to replace it.
This is the default setting for all accounts.
This option optimizes your revenue opportunities. However, it carries a slightly higher risk of late presentment chargebacks, typically occurring in a small number of .
If your account is configured to be risk averse, then Digital River only attempts to a when either (1) the original payment authorization has yet to expire or (2) we can secure a new authorization to replace the expired one. In other words, Digital River never attempts to force settle on an expired authorization.
With this option, you can minimize late presentment chargebacks. However, by setting up your account to be risk-averse, you risk losing out on potential revenue. This is because the issuing bank ultimately approves many expired authorization capture attempts.
By allowing customers to pre-order goods, you can sell products that are unavailable or out of stock. This can be useful to generate excitement around an upcoming release or forecast demand for a new product.
This section provides information on how to handle checkouts and process fulfillments that contain pre-ordered goods.
With the pre-orders feature:
You can select the Direct Integration or Low-code checkouts as your checkout solution.
Customers checking out can be guests or registered in Digital River's system.
Customers can select from any of our supported payment methods.
Depending on whether your account is set up to be risk tolerant or risk averse, the following sections outline, at a high level, some possible approaches to fulfilling pre-ordered goods.
The actual solution you implement is highly dependent on your fulfillment setup. For example, you'll likely need to analyze how your fulfiller and warehouses communicate, the responsiveness of that integration, and at what points in the pipeline shipments can be cancelled.
At this point, your integration should be set up to handle both success and failure responses.
Passing trackingCompany, trackingNumber, and trackingUrl in this update request helps Digital River detect fraud and manage chargeback risks.
The payment_authorization_failed error could trigger a request to your fulfiller that instructs them to cancel the order before the goods are shipped.
From the event, you could retrieve items[].productDetails, payment.sources[], and other data and use it to populate a payment failed notification (typically an email) sent to the customer. If your business model supports it, you could also attempt to get a new payment method from the customer.
In the Digital River APIs, checkouts that involve pre-ordered goods don't require any unique customizations. This means you're not required to pass additional data in , , or .
A checkout or items[] can be physical or digital. Additionally, they can be a mix of pre-ordered and "normal" goods.
In registered checkouts and , the primary payment source doesn't need to be saved to the .
Whichever chargeback risk option you select, the state should be accepted before you initiate fulfillment operations.
If your account is set up to be risk tolerant, wait until the pre-ordered items[] are ready to be released, and then instruct your fulfiller to ship them. Once your fulfiller notifies you that the goods are in transit, send Digital River a POST /fulfillments request that includes any tracking data they may have provided, along with the quantity of each items[] that's getting delivered.
Whether Digital River (1) attempts to capture and settle on the original payment authorization because it has yet to expire, (2) successfully creates a new authorization to replace the expired one, or (3) fails to create a new authorization and then force settles on the original, expired one, your request immediately returns a and this results in the creation of an whose type is order.charge.capture.pending and whose data.object is a .
These notifications indicate that Digital River is trying to that charge.
Once the payment processor informs Digital River whether the succeeded or failed, we create an whose type is either order.charge.capture.complete or order.charge.capture.failed, respectively.
Both could be used to trigger a function that updates the payment status in your system. Additionally, you might use the failed event's captures[].fulfillmentId to look up the and then send a request to your fulfiller that attempts to cancel the shipment of those goods.
If your account is set up to be risk averse, wait until the pre-ordered items[] are ready to be released and then send Digital River a POST /fulfillments request that specifies the quantity of each items[] that's scheduled to be shipped.
If Digital River determines that the original payment authorization has yet to expire or (if it's no longer valid) successfully creates a new authorization, then your POST/ fulfillments request immediately returns a , and this results in the creation of an whose type is order.charge.capture.pending and whose data.object is a .
Both of these notifications indicate that we're trying to the .
At this point, you should send a request to your fulfiller instructing them to ship the goods and, once they notify you that they're in transit, .
Once the payment processor informs Digital River whether the succeeded or failed, we create an whose type is either order.charge.capture.complete or order.charge.capture.failed, respectively.
Both could be used to trigger a function that updates the payment status in your system. Additionally, you might use the failed event's captures[].fulfillmentId to look up the and then send a request to your fulfiller that attempts to cancel the shipment of those goods.
If Digital River determines that the original payment authorization has expired and we're unable to get the issuing bank to grant a new authorization, then your POST/ fulfillments request immediately returns an error with a of payment_authorization_failed and this results in the creation of an whose type is order.charge.reauth.failed and whose data.object is the .
These notifications indicate that we won't be able to the .
If you have a transaction that contains multiple pre-ordered items, but they're not all ready to ship at the same time, and you send a with a partial quantity of these items[] that throws a payment authorization failed exception; then any subsequent capture attempts are also likely to fail. As a result, in this particular scenario, we recommend that you cancel all of that transaction's pre-ordered items.
Our payments mocker doesn't currently support testing reauthorizations in a . However, once feature-specific test credit card numbers become available, we'll add them to the docs.
