Admin Confirm Order Before Payment..??

Hello,

Does anyone know if it is possible to set up ZenCart where the admin would have to confirm the order before the customer can complete payment?

What payments are you wanting to accept?

I'm not 100% decided as of yet.... Would a particular payment method make this easier to do?

Well - COD or check/money order would be the easiest - but, why are you thinking you need to confirm the orders?

I'm doing this for a client... hopefully... but I know he's wanting to take payments online... probably PayPal or Authorize.Net

He's doing printed items, and he wants to be able to confirm with the customer that they're ordered the correct options for their items before accepting payments to avoid having to do a bunch of refunds.

Well ... I can understand what he wants to do, but that will make things much slower and possibly confusing to customers. Online shoppers are used to picking their items, going through the checkout and paying for their items.

In the Free Add Ons section, their is a module called PayPal Request(?) - the idea being you can checkout without paying and once the order is finalized the shop owner sends a PayPal invoice to the customer.

Also note - editing orders from the Zen Cart Admin is not a stock feature yet. So the original order and the Payment request could end up different.

If the final payment amount is never going to change, and all you need to do is not "charge" them until the customer has confirmed their "proofs", you could set your payment module into "authorize only" mode, and then manually "capture" the payment later.
That way the customer provides their payment details during checkout. THe payment company verifies that the funds are available and puts a hold on that money for a few (usually 3-7) days. Then when you ship the order, you manually go to the payment company's site and "capture" the "authorization", moving the "hold" to an actual "charge", at which point the "held" money is transferred to you. If you don't "capture" the order, the hold is removed and the customer is never actually charged.

If the final amount is going to change only due to shipping amounts, you can usually specify the shipping cost to the order when you go to the payment company's site and capture the payment there. There will be rules relating to how much you can increase the authorized amount for shipping ... usually only up to about 20% over the original authorized amount. Check with your gateway company or payment service provider for specific details.

I am looking for this functionality also. However, our order amount will change depending on the shipping.

Depending on which payment gateway you're using, you can specify the final shipping amount when you actually capture the payment for the transaction.

Kim Said:

In the Free Add Ons section, their is a module called PayPal Request(?) - the idea being you can checkout without paying and once the order is finalized the shop owner sends a PayPal invoice to the customer.Hi Kim, I have a question for you (or anyone who cares to answer)

I'm going to be adding some custom made items to my store (Quilts). The orders will be fulfilled by a third party. Since they are highly customized, there is no way to price them or even display them with a price.

Samples with an average low to high pricing will be shown in the store and customers will be instructed to contact us with specifics about what they want. They will then be given a quote. If they accept the quote, they will then be charged the full amount (including tax and shipping) and the product will be shipped as soon as it is completed.

My question is...what is the best way to set that up in ZC?

You mentioned the PayPal Request Mod that allows me to invoice customers through PayPal later. I also see an Invoice mod that allows me to bill by invoice for a certain price group.

Which of these two Mods do you think will be:

1. Most appropriate for my purposes
2. Easiest from an administrative perspective
3. Easiest on my customers (this is my highest priority).

Thanks in advance for the help :)

PS, my payment gateway is PayPal IPN Website Payments Standard

I went to the add on section and did a search for "PayPal", a search for "invoice" and a search for "bill" and none of them turned up the PayPal Request Mod.

Taking a closer look at the Invoice Mod, I'm not sure that will work for me either. I misunderstood the nature of Group Pricing. I thought this Mod would allow me to select products by price and place them in a group, which would then offer customers the option to pay via invoice.

But as it turns out, the customer has to be in a special pricing group in order to get this option. That means in order to use the Invoice Mod, the customer would have to be placed in a pricing group temporarily until the order is complete, and then removed. (This is because the bulk of our products are downloadable, so I can't have customers getting the option to pay later by invoice).

Ultimately what I'd like to do is create an order for them once the quote has been accepted, send it or a link to it via email, and have them pay it.

I'm not sure how to best accomplish this. I haven't seen anything that will allow me to create my own orders in the Admin on a customer's behalf. It seems the only way to complete a transaction is to have them go through the check out process with an actual product.

As a last resort, once the quote is accepted I could always create a product in the cart and direct them to go through the check out process, but that sounds like a hassle for them and me, since I'd have to remove the product once the transaction is complete.

Suggestions?

Sorry all - I found my own solution. I found a Mod called "Offsite Payment". (I suspect this is the one Kim was talking about in her post).

It provides the option during check out to select payment through PayPal (or whatever payment method a store owner might want to use).

While there's no way to prevent customers from selecting this inappropriately, I can edit the language file to provide some instruction on appropriate use on the check out page.

Additionally, I should be able to prevent customers from downloading without paying by setting the order status for this payment method to 'pending' and then setting my downloadables to only be available for download an order status of 'delivered'.

While Although nothing stops a customer from selecting this payment option for a downloadable product, they won't be able to get it until they pay for it.

It appears this solves the problem without putting downloadables at risk for theft.