Can I Delay a Charge?

I want to provide a 7 day free trial where people can download my product and check it out. If they like it, they do nothing and they're charged. If they don't like it they e-mail me and I cancel the order before they're even charged.

Is this possible? I'd like to place a hold on the money so that I know they can pay if possible, but this isn't necessary. Checking to make sure their info is valid would be enough.

Tynan

Here's the concept:

Use a credit card payment module that allows you to simply "Authorize" instead of "Capture" the funds. Then, after 7 days, manually go into your CC transactions and capture each of the orders you're ready to collect on.

The exact how-to for this will depend on which payment gateway you use and which merchant account services you have available.

Hey DrByte,

I really appreciate your reply. Is there any way to do that automatically (or to pay someone to make something to do it automatically?). Almost everyone keeps the book so it would be rare that I would need to manually edit an order.

If it's helpful, I use authorize.net

Tynan

You can set your authorize.net settings in Zen Cart to authorize instead of capture.

It is not easy to automate the "capturing" process. It's possible, but the code is not currently built-in to Zen Cart. You'd need to to build the code to issue the capture call to authorize.net's servers, and then write a script to do the captures daily for transactions initiated 7 days ago.
It's possible, but will require custom coding to make it happen.

I suspect there's nothing against doing something like this in your merchant account TOS, as auth and capt are standard activities, even when automated.

You can certainly get started by switching to Authorize Only mode, and become familiar with the Capture procedures.

[insert standard disclaimer:] If you choose to hire someone to assist with coding, be sure to check out their reputation and demonstration of skill :)

cornrow
Please drop me a PM and lets discuss
May be I can help you out with what you are looking at