Visa merchant library update on December 13, 2016. Visa provides a Partial Authorization service that provides an alternative to declining a transaction when the card’s available balance is not sufficient to approve a transaction in full. This flyer provides information about the benefits realized, how to use the service, and answers to frequently asked questions.

PDF 326 KB Visa Partial Authorization Service – Improve the Customer Experience and Increase Sales

“Partial authorization improves the customer experience by preventing embarrassment from a decline at the point of sale and enabling a seamless checkout with split tender transaction using multiple payment methods.” Christine Speedy

To accept partial authorizations for your business, a few items are needed:

• Technology that supports it. Payment gateways certify partial authorization for each acquirer. Not all gateways certify.  The receipt must also show each payment amount.
• The merchant must enable it. For example, this could be a checkbox in the ERP or shopping cart software payments module, or it might be turned on at the gateway administration level. It’s possible a gateway is certified, but the related software using the gateway does not support it.

If partial authorization is not supported, and there’s a decline due to insufficient funds, there’s still an open authorization for the funds that were in the account. An authorization reversal should be completed to remove hold on any cardholder funds. If you don’t want screaming customers, this is a must! Intelligent technology can automate this process.

Compliance with credit card processing rules can be extremely complicated. Relying upon employee training is futile. To improve your customer experience and automate rules compliance, contact Christine today at 954-942-0483.