Not sure what the PayPal authorization thing is, I couldn't check out and had 2 emails from PayPal saying that I authorized 2 payments of $400+ to Keyclack yet nothing shows up in my orders and funds have been taken from my PayPal account Q_Q
An authorization is a theoretical “transaction” a merchant processor charges to an account in order to verify that it is an active ‘funded’ account before attempting an actual transaction across it. Typically a processor will authorize between $1-$10 that typically falls off your account at the time of the actual transaction. If the authorization fails then the system knows the account can’t process the actual transaction and the transaction is declined. Sometimes authorizations will take time to fall off. There is no reason Keyclack should process an authorization for the full amount of the transaction that is being authorized for, not only is it radical overkill, but it can, and in Keyclack’s situation does, take time to fall off, and then if you don’t have enough money after the authorization to process the actual transaction you can have the whole thing fail just because you didn’t expect to need twice the amount of the purchase you are trying to make.
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The authorization is an authorization to proceed with the payment. Since our site is a custom build, you have to authorize us to charge you X amount.
Once you hit place order, the order is confirmed with our site (our backend), and your payment is charged and collected.
So you can have an authorization, without an order, but then that auth will be voided as it isn't confirmed by our site, so the charge won't post. If you used a card of any sort, the payment is left "Pending", but not "Charged". These are states in the payment processor.
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To put in simple terms, this is a situation which I am aware of, and we'll fix it. Unfortunately, the circumstances of 'FCFS' sales, don't help this in anyway.
Regarding cart locking and such: this is a case which is hard to tackle because there are two sides of the coin. On one side, someone who has something in their cart, prevents someone else from getting it. Assuming they do not proceed in X time, the logical step is to put that item back into the inventory for sale. However, it's hard to say that this is fair because what if someone else wanted it, but it was cart locked, then thrown back into the inventory, then someone else can get it who could have had it first.
By having it be "First to check out", the problem is somewhat mitigated. It isn't the most elegant solution, but it helps the people who can check out faster, get it first.
It's interesting to see the mechanics of ecommerce come into play, and I'd love to hear your opinion about which way to go. It's hard to make completely fair, but hopefully there's a way to make it more fair.