The way it works is, someone goes through the check out process on our website, and chooses PayPal as the payment option. Then it directs them to the PayPal website and they 'authorize' the amount of the purchase.
On our end, when we ship out the order, we 'capture' those funds. If we're sold out of the item, we 'void' the order. Seems pretty simple and I'm sure anyone with a PayPal account has taken advantage of this option in the past.
However, occasionally, we get an error on our end where we're unable to capture the funds. Everything looks normal, until we click to confirm the capture. Then we get a very generic error,
"We are sorry, we cannot process this settlement at this time."
Sometimes, we wait a day and it magically works. In this latest example, for an $89.95 tennis racket, it has been about a week with no luck. The customer already has the item and we're still unable to capture their funds.
So we emailed PayPal for help. Unfortunately they were no help at all.
I figured they were going to capture the funds for us, or do something on the backend. Or have a 2nd or 3rd option we could try.
Asking the customer for a 2nd payment when they already have a pending authorization with us (that we're unable to capture) does not seem like the ideal way to handle this.
We'll have to look into our own processes, especially capturing funds before the items are shipped. But in this case the customer had requested Priority Mail and they obviously needed it by a certain date. We've always wanted to get the orders out as quickly as possible, and it would be a huge inconvenience to the customer to keep them waiting.
