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Comment by jeromeparadis | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if I could do the following... Any help would be appreciated.

Here's the scenario: a seller is selling something expensive. Some buyers may prefer purchasing by credit card (simple) but others may prefer to wire money to the seller. To guarantee the transaction, we would take an authorization on a credit card for, let's say 10 days and if the buyer transfers the amount during that time, we remove the hold on the credit card. If he hasn't transferred the money after the elapsed time, then we would charge the card.

Would Stripe or Balanced support such a scenario and if so, what would be the fees? Is there any impact of having a lot of CC holds that don't go through?

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(I work at Stripe)

You can't currently accept payments with Stripe via wire, but you can accept payments via ACH-in (currently in beta: email amber@stripe.com for access) as well as debit/credit card. You could certainly do exactly what you describe with ACH-in and a separate authorization/capture process via credit/debit card, however authorizations expire in 7 days, so you may want to keep that in mind.

I suggest doing a separate authorization and capture via credit card (https://stripe.com/blog/auth-capture) OR accepting payments via ACH-in, rather than attempting to do both at the same time which can lead to customer confusion.

Stripe only charges upon a successful transaction (https://stripe.com/pricing), so the uncaptured authorizations will not cost you money.

Thanks!

Hey Jerome! I work at Balanced.

We won't be supporting wire transfers: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/267

As our CEO says in that thread, given that we do same-day payouts to Wells Fargo and next-day payouts to all other banks, we think ACH debits are a better use-case than a wire transfer in this scenario.

To handle your case with ACH debits, you would debit the bank account, it would go into our escrow, and then when the seller ships, you would pay them out.

Now, for one or two other things:

We absolutely support the ability to do an authorization and then a capture: we call it a 'hold', since we provide both ACH and credit card processing. Holds are free, and you pay the same price when you capture as when you do a regular charge: https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing

And we put a limit of seven days for a hold. As you've asked, credit card companies don't like seeing lots of voided holds: you've basically frozen someone's funds for a period of time. Doing it often generally means something else is going wrong.

Thanks to you too!

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