Paylink supports pre-authorisation processes that involve
- an initial pre-authorisation of a Transaction, marked as the requested amount;
- receipt of a message indicating the success or failure of the pre-authorised Transaction;
- a subsequent completion or cancellation of the transaction via the CityPay API . Note that the completion command may increase or decrease the final amount.
Pre-authorised Transaction support is typically required for Merchants that require situations where the price may not be final, or there is a risk that the particular resource to be supplied to the customer may not in fact be supplied due to ordering, technical or communications failure. A pre-authorisation requires a completion or cancellation request to close the transaction. This should be completed within 7 days to ensure no additional fees are applied by MasterCard. We mark the transaction as an estimated amount which complies with the MasterCard mandate for Pre-Authorisation reservations and on completion of the transaction, an optional final actual amount can be set.
Pre-authorised Transaction support is required to be activated on your account and may be forced to pre-auth by default.
Requests into Paylink allow for configuration to bypass or enforce rules to ensure that you can pre-authorise only when required. To enforce a pre-auth, set the configuration value under config/options to include BYPASS_PREAUTH or ENFORCE_PREAUTH.
In all respects, a pre-authorised transaction is the same as a standard authorisation apart from the status field will be returned as 'P' for 'PreAuth'.