#shooshtime - auction site
plucky falcon
thanks 🙂
fair marsh
Ok, so each time the customer bids, is a new hold created? Is that why there are very high hold totals?
plucky falcon
correct
fair marsh
Gotcha. You could cancel the old PaymentIntents once they make a higher bid. Or are you already doing that?
plucky falcon
Are we able to bring in our other developer in this thread?
fair marsh
Yeah, absolutely
ebon dust
Hey guys. Yep we cancel previous bid payment when making higher
fair marsh
So is the issue with the high holds, just from them bidding large amounts? (ie. the $20,000 hold is the 4%)
Or holds just aren't released in time?
plucky falcon
The issue is some users who bid multiple times will have several holds
We put a cap on our 'fee' (~$4,000)
so our holds will never go over this
you can see here, the user 'Houston Crosta', had multiple $4,000 charges
$20,000 just in holds from participating in 1 auction
He said it took almost a week for these to drop off
plucky falcon
You bet, thank you!
spark herald
Hey @plucky falcon this is relatively normal as the cancelation is effectively handled as a refund to the customer bank, and it can take 5-10 days to disappear from the statement, depending on the bank:
https://stripe.com/docs/refunds
plucky falcon
Yep, figured that, we're trying to figure if there's a way to only set it up so there's only 1 hold/charge even if the user places multiple bids
spark herald
If you're reached some cap, you may want to consider just holding that same auth for the duration of the auction in case the same customer re-bids
plucky falcon
so if user hits the $4,000 cap, we just hold this amount until end of auction (our auctions run 7 days) even if they place multiple bids, get outbid, etc
fair marsh
Yes, that would be correct
plucky falcon
not a bad idea
it's easier to stomach multiple $100 charges, vs multiple $4,000 charges 🙂
spark herald
While below your cap, you can also keep the previous hold until the new one is authorized. eg say you have a $1000 hold and new $1500, you defer cancelling the $1000 until the $1500 is approved. If it fails, you can give the customer an opportunity to provide another card etc.
You could also choose to auth only the new amount, the extra $500. You end up paying the flat rate portion of the stripe fee twice (or more), but compared to the full amount and relative to the %-based fee this is very small.
regal forum
Hello @plucky falcon 👋 , what is your followup question?
plucky falcon
Hey Pompey, to bring you up to speed, we run an auction website where users have the ability to bid on cars for sale posted up by other users. We charge a 4% service fee, which is calculated based on the users bid (ie. 4% $1,000 service fee on a $25,000 bid). We're trying to figure out a better way to do this so if a user bids multiple times, they don't have several "holds" on their credit card.
We are thinking it would be best to do the following:
If user A places a bid in the amount of $25,000, we place a $1,000 hold on his credit card for the duration of the auction (~7 days). This is the only hold we place, if user A happens to win the auction at let's say $100,000. We cancel out the $1,000 hold and place an actual charge in the amount of $4,000 (our 4% service fee).
The only issue with this is, how would we verify the user has sufficient funds to cover the $4,000?
(Hope this makes sense)
Is there a way for stripe to check to see if user has sufficient funds to cover an amount without having to place a hold?
For example: If user A makes a $25,000 bid (we can place a 1 time hold of $1,000). If user A makes another bid for $50,000 we can verify that the user has sufficient funds to pay our 4% service fee, however, we don't need to place a hold in order to verify this.
regal forum
Unfortunately I think a hold is the only way to confirm that with our API. And I see that was some of the suggestion yesterday, I will need to catch up on the context a bit more
plucky falcon
sure
regal forum
So where did you end up falling on synthrider's suggestions from yesterday? Would keeping the same $4k auth (or multiple auths adding up to $4k) be feasible instead of making a new one each time?
Or maybe I am making assumptions. Is the issue that you are placing a hold at all or that the total held funds was way more than $4k?
plucky falcon
Total held funds exceeded more than $4,000
We had an auction that went over $100,000 with multiple bidders
So everytime a user would bid, we would put a $4,000 hold on
Someone had $20,000 in "holds" from the 4 bids they placed
In the event someone doesn't have a high limit credit card, this would be an issue
It's rare that an auction will hit and exceed $100,000 so we're not as crazy concerned about it, however, it would be great to figure out how we could only place a 1 time hold on a user's credit card no matter how many times they bid, and whatever the outcome may be of the auction, adjust it then
regal forum
Gotcha. I think that that is a great solution. It is a bit up to you on how to implement it
You can track on your side how much has been held for someone for an auction, like when the hold is confirmed, store that that amount has been held for them for that auction.
You may be able to utilize things in our API like metadata to keep track of what PI is tied to which auction but ultimately this is about making some check on your side to see if you should hold more for this specific user. https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_intents/object#payment_intent_object-metadata