Pre-auth or equivalent with customer not present?

[MrH]

As part of every car hire, we take a security deposit whilst cars are on hire (a pre-authorised transaction), and do this via our chip and pin machines with the client here.

Now looking at another spin off to the business which will require the same sort of pre-auth transaction (value less at circa £500-£1000) but doing this remotely the day before. Reason being we are looking at multiple locations and it simply wont be practical or workable having a card machine at every site. User knowledge will vary too and could forsee a mountain of questions and tech probs.

So would like to do this from "HQ" so that when a client arrives at one of these locations this is all done. Not finding anything so far but not 100% sure what to search to be honest. There must be a way of doing something along the lines of a pre-auth remotely?

I did wonder how you can secure a hotel booking with a credit/debit card without it being charged, as this is what all hotels do when booking online. What is this process called? It is rare we would ever need to charge it but we have to take it for security.

Any pointers would be a great help

Cheers, Mark

[MrSparks]

I have this feature, I use World Pay/Cardsave and have an "ECOMM" MOTO account. I can set my website to either take the amount of pre-authorise the amount. However you can also use "virtual terminal" where you can take customer not present sales directly into the system, you can set it to pre-auth so I guess this would achieve what you want?

I think it's a fairly common feature, MOTO account, Mail Order Telephone Order. Requires someone to manually log in, or you could set it up via a website no doubt, if you do online bookings.

[MrH]

That sounds like the sort of thing. Wanted to try and avoid having 2 merchant accounts (one offline one online) as our normal payments go via Streamline currently.

Wondering if Paypal virtual terminal would do the same thing