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Delayed payment is a feature added in X-Payments Cloud 4.5.0 and supported only by X-Payments Cloud Connector for X-Cart 5. This feature provides the ability for buyers not to pay for their order at the time of order placement in cases where the exact total amount of the order is not known or is subject to change. With Delayed payment, no money actually changes hands at the time of placing an order. What happens is the buyer’s payment card information is saved in a PCI DSS compliant manner so later the merchant can review the order and adjust the order total amount as needed. When that happens, the final order total amount is debited from the buyer’s saved payment card.

The uncertainty/variability of the order total amount may be due to many reasons; for example, you will not be able to tell the buyer the exact amount in scenarios where:

Delayed payment relies on card tokenization, so tokenization must be enabled in X-Payments Cloud for the feature to work.

At this time, there are some limitations due to which you and your customers may be unable to use the Delayed payment mode of X-Payments Cloud:

To enable the "Delayed payment" mode for your store, follow the steps below:

This enables the "Delayed payment" mode.

In a store with X-Payments Cloud "Delayed payment" mode enabled, a shopper who adds some products to the shopping cart and goes to checkout finds themselves going through the standard store checkout routine.

At the point where they are supposed to select a payment method, they choose the method implemented by X-Payments Cloud.

If the shopper chooses to pay with a new card, this card will be saved via X-Payments tokenization. The shopper will be warned that an authorization will be made to attach their payment card to the order.

If the shopper chooses to pay with a previously saved card, no additional authorization will take place as the card is already saved.

Note that the shopper will not be able to remove any saved cards associated with orders placed in the "Delayed payment" mode until all the respective orders have been moved to the "Processed" status or canceled.

Once the order is placed, the order amount will NOT be charged/authorized. The shopper will receive an order invoice as usual.

As the merchant (admin/back-end user) makes changes to the order and charges the final amount as delayed payment, the order details visible to the shopper in their account and the order invoice sent to the shopper via email notification will be updated to reflect the order amount change.

In the "Delayed payment" mode, orders that are placed by the buyers are created with the payment status "Awaiting payment".

If you check the Payments section of the X-Payments Cloud admin panel after an order has been placed, initially there will be no record of a payment for the amount of the order total there; there will only be a record of a small payment that was made to tokenize the card (i.e. to securely save the card information so it can be used later to pay for this order; see Tokenization and Re-Use of Saved Credit Cards for details.) The payment to tokenize the card will have the status "Canceled", which is perfectly normal and means that after the authorization of the payment the authorized amount has been released back to the customer's account. On the screenshot below you can see a card tokenization payment of $1; $1 is used here because that is the transaction amount for card tokenization in our X-Cart store - a value that can be adjusted via the General Settings of X-Payments Cloud. (We are using $1, the value set by default; in real-life situation, you may want to check with your payment processor as to what sum will be appropriate for this purpose as different payment processors will have different requirements for that matter.)

Once an order has been created in the store, you can review its information and change the order total (including the shipping cost) as you require. For example, in an X-Cart-based store, we can use Advanced Order Management to change the set of items in the order, the price of some products, the cost of shipping, the applied discounts, etc. That will cause the order total amount to change. For the sake of example, let us change the shipping cost for our order from $2.63 to $3.00. After we recalculate the order totals, we will see that the order total amount is now $14.99 instead of $14.62:

As soon as we are done making changes to the order details we can save them. Now we know the order total amount is final, and we can complete the payment. On the order details page in the store's back end, select to Complete the payment.

You will be able to charge the card that was saved for delayed payment.

If the customer has more than one stored card, you will be able to select the card to be charged.

Once the card has been charged, a new record will appear in the Payments section of X-Payments Cloud - this time in the amount of the final order total.

Question: What should be the behavior if some particular product is marked as a subscription one and as a "charged later" one at the same time?

Answer: Subscription products cannot be marked as "Delayed payment". See the Delayed Payment Limitations section above.

See also: