njdubois

Thanks a million for the reply! To answer your question, what we figure would cause someone to not pay for a winning bid is when they literally wanted to slow the non-prof down. Giving the item to the next highest bid isn't a punishment for them as they don't care. As for your other options, they are fantastic. From a programmers perspective they seem like the way to go, but for the UX perspective maybe not so much. Is a customer going to enter their credit details a second time to increase a max bid 10 bucks? Maybe, maybe not? Our major takeaway from your reply is that awarding the next highest bidder is the smart choice, regardless. We are going to take payment details at the time the auction is won, and if they don't pay, give it to the next in line. Really you gave us peace of mind knowing there isn't some key bit of software out there already, and maybe there should be? I guess our competition actually did become their own gateway, which means they did the work to be able to store CC details. Which must be insane. The basic reading I did on it scared the crap out of me. Thanks again for the reply. You have been a huge help steering us towards the best solution.

Is not an option. There, now that I have your attention, I have an interesting problem. We are a portal for non profits. We have no leverage over what payment gateway a non profit uses. We need to token-ize credit card details, regardless of the gateway. Whether a gateway supports this process , even without first having a successful transaction seems to be a flip of the coin. For example, paypal pro and stripe will return a token during the checkout process, but you have to go through that process, with a dollar amount. Authorize.net and transnational allow you to "vault" the credit card details. Paypal pro will let you capture details, and change the capture amount, but is limited on how much that amount can change. Our current project is a auction app, and we need to insure that someone can't skip out on a won auction. So we would like to get credit card details, and store them at account creation. It seems the only option is to store these details ourselves, but of course this leads to HUGE complications, risks and will require a substantial cost in time on a regular basis for the entire lifespan of this project. Continuously insuring compliance, and keeping up with changes to be secure would almost be a weekly task. So what do we do? If we can't/shouldn't store the credit details, and we can't get a non-profit to use a payment gateway of our choice, what are our options? We cannot be a middle man for the payments as it goes against a message. Thoughts, recommendations? Ropes to hang myself with as this seems like it's a lose lose situation? lol, thanks!

We want to help non profits run auctions, sometimes these non profits use paypal. We won't know a final price until the auction is over so we cannot just authorize a payment of $x. With gateways like authorize.net, you can submit billing details and get a token back. Than, when ever the customer checks out you just submit that token instead of credit card details. I need to do the same process with paypal and per the documentation it is unclear if this is even an option. Unfortunately getting these organizations to leave paypal is generally not an option. I know you can authorize a payment for later capture: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/payments/authorize-and-capture-payments/ But -I think- this expects you to submit an amount and this amount has a very limited amount it can increase. It can go up 115% or $75, but it's for an auction and we have no idea how to tell what an item will go for. Thoughts? Ideas? Concerns? Thanks a ton Nick

I'm thinking this isn't the best place to ask this. I looked at all the other forums and none of them really fit. My client has had major issues with GoDaddy the past week and a half. He has been in 2 different states trying to sign up new clients and has had major connection issues with the shared godaddy server. To the point where it sits there for minutes before timing out. Over and over and over, all day not just during peeks. Of course, we know, a shared server... according to godaddy, there may be load problems and thats that. They pretty much said, we are sorry to hear that, spend more money and get this. My client wants to leave godaddy, and we both agree to switch over to a vps anyway. The question is who? So since I love this site. you guys rule! I'm asking the question here. Whats your host of choice? Keep in mind I need php/mysql and the ability to use exec() so I can do server side audio file conversions. I'd prefer to have it all setup for me, though I'm sure I could find someone to do it. As always, thanks! Nick