How do I store and charge customer credit cards?
It's possible to store customer's credit card details, and attempt to charge them at a later date.
Customer credit card details are stored via Stripe or Square. Please connect your Stripe or Square account first. Stripe and Square store these details in a secure vault, and they cannot be viewed by you, or by Ovatu staff. Ovatu sends a request to your Stripe or Square account to charge a specific card, at your request.
The Stripe and Square integrations work differently for card capture:
- Stripe - You can capture card details without taking a payment, and you can also capture card details while also taking a payment
- Square - Either you can take a payment while your customers are creating a booking online, or you can capture their card details without taking a payment. It's not possible to both take a payment and capture card details at the same time with the Square integration.
Card Capture Via Online Booking
To collect credit card details from customers via online booking, enable Online Payments and Card Capture which is the requirement for customers to provide their credit card details in order to secure a booking.
- This can be enabled globally (for all services apart from zero value services) by clicking Online Booking > Settings and scrolling to the Payments section and selecting the Enable Online Payments and Enable Card Capture checkboxes and entering your card capture policy into the Card Capture Policy Content field (see: How do I take deposits and payments online?)
- This can also be enabled or disabled for a specific service, click Manage > Services > List and then the Edit icon against the relevant service, then select the Online Payment Require Card Capture checkbox. This overrides any global Card Capture settings and will also capture card details for zero cost services
Manually Adding Credit Card Details
To manually add credit card details to a customer file, open the file by clicking Customers > List and clicking on the customer's name.
Click the Actions button, then Stored Credit Cards
Here you can view any credit cards that are already stored for this customer here:
A credit card can be deleted by clicking the red [x]
A new credit card can be added by clicking + Add Card and selecting either Store with Stripe or Store with Square
Charging a Saved Credit Card
Important note for European customers: It is no longer possible to charge stored cards in countries that are enforcing Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) regulation. This is because SCA requires the payment to be completed in the customers browser and they also need to authorise the payment for it to succeed. This includes the UK as of March 2022.
Saved credit cards can be used as a payment method, when adding a payment to a sale, by simply clicking the Stored Credit Card option
The stored credit cards will display, select Charge with... to process the payment:
It's also possible to charge a stored credit card by clicking directly on the Stripe or Square button:
This will present you with the option to either charge a stored credit card using either payment processor, or charge a new credit card.
Selecting the Remember this card option and then clicking Charge Card, will charge the new card and also store the credit card details so that it can be charged again at a later date.
When a new card is added to the card capture function during the online booking process, the merchant account (Stripe or Square) validates the card information at that time. This does not guarantee that any future charges will succeed. As you can imagine credit cards can at any time have insufficient funds, be reported lost or stolen, or the account could be closed. Ovatu has no role in card validation or transactions. Square stores the card details and actions the transactions for you. If a transaction with a stored card is declined/fails, please log into your Stripe or Square account or contact them. They'll be able to let you know why the transaction failed.
