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skymasterson avatar image
skymasterson asked 4leaflabs commented

How should I should I handle declines with a partial auth?

For an online payments app, we've been seeing transactions get declined with the message "partial auth".

In some cases, these payments seem to process and convert into fully paid transactions.

eg. Run a charge for $10, but decline with a partial auth. However, a payment of $8 is posted to the order right away. In a few days, another $2 sometimes comes in to complete the transaction.

What's the best way to handle these transactions?

If we should decline the full transaction, is there a way to cancel the payment so that a partial payment is not left on the order? eg. delete payment?

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4leaflabs avatar image 4leaflabs commented ·

Following up on this one. So when I run a transaction against /pay it will return a response with a paymentID, but also have result=DECLINED failureMessage='partial auth'.

What's the best way to handle these? Do I reject the whole transaction OR do I find a way to collect the remainder.

I'd prefer to reject the entire transaction, but what are the ramification if we take that approach?

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Jeffrey Blattman avatar image Jeffrey Blattman ♦♦ commented ·

It's up to you how you handle it. Like Mike said, a partial auth is a valid transaction for less than the requested amount. In our apps, we give the merchant the option of voiding the payment or continuing and accepting another payment for the remaining amount.

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1 Answer

Mike M avatar image
Mike M answered 4leaflabs commented

A partial auth is technically an approved payment, however I can see that the DECLINED result would be confusing. If you query for the order's payments, the partially authed payment should be present.

I found TransFirst documentation on Partial Auths to be quite helpful in explaining the use case and the necessary steps to resolve it. http://www.transfirst.com/resources/m...

Specifically:

In this transaction, the merchant needs to inform the cardholder of the partial authorization and request the $28.01 balance through some other form of tender, such as cash, check or another payment card.

I would advise for querying the customer for an additional payment method to cover the unpaid amount. If they decline/cancel, then the previous partial auth payment should be voided and the entire order/transaction, rejected.

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4leaflabs avatar image 4leaflabs commented ·

Thanks for the update. If we wanted to void the payment, is there an API to do it?

I checked https://www.clover.com/rest-api#POST%... and didn't see anything obvious.

I also didn't find any DELETE methods in the v3 API either. https://www.clover.com/api_docs#!/pay...

Thanks!

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Mike M avatar image Mike M commented ·

Hey @4leaflabs, we explicitly hide those endpoints to prevent money from basically being stolen from merchants. Please reach out to us at dev [at] clover [dot] com and we can discuss this further.

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4leaflabs avatar image 4leaflabs commented ·

Hi Mike - thanks for the detailed info.

Curious how we might be able to re-create a partial auth in the sandbox environment. Is there a way to do this so that we can debug and test?

Thanks!

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Mike M avatar image Mike M commented ·

Try using these test credit card numbers, specifically, the one with an error code 2 for "partial auth".

I just tested this with my sandbox merchant and it successfully returned a "partial auth" failure message as intended. Please note that my sandbox gateway is RapidConnect, as opposed to Blackhole, so please let us know if you have experience any issues.

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