The various services used to process payments are at the heart of payment processing. These services enable customers to purchase goods and services, merchants receive payments from the customer's accounts, merchants to provide refunds, and merchants to void transactions.

Authorization Workflow

  1. The customer purchases goods or service from the merchant using a payment card.
  2. The merchant sends an authorization request to
    the acquiring (merchant) bank
    .
  3. The acquiring (merchant) bank
    forwards the authorization request to the payment network.
  4. The payment network forwards the authorization request to the issuer (customer) bank.
  5. If funds are available, the issuer (customer) bank reserves the amount of the authorization request and returns an authorization approval to the payment network. If the issuer (customer) bank denies the request, it returns an authorization denial.
  6. The payment network forwards the message to
    the acquiring (merchant) bank
    .
  7. The acquiring (merchant) bank
    forwards the message to the merchant.

Capture

A capture is a follow-on transaction to an authorization. It is used to transfer the authorized funds from the customer's account to the merchant account. To link the authentication transaction to the capture transaction, you include a request ID in your capture request. This request ID is returned to you during the authentication response.
Capture are typically not performed in real time. They are placed in a batch file and sent to the processor and the processor settles all of the captures at one time. In most cases, these batch files are sent and processed outside of the merchant's business hours. It usually takes two to four days for the acquiring financial institution to deposit the funds into the merchant account.
When fulfilling only part of a customer’s order, do not capture the full amount of the authorization. Capture only the cost of the delivered items. When you deliver the remaining items, request a new authorization, and then capture the new authorization.
It is not possible to perform a capture if a transaction is in a review state, which can occur if you use a fraud management service. You must accept the transaction prior to capture. For more information, see the fraud management documentation in
the
Business Center
.

Capture Workflow

  1. The merchant sends one or more transaction capture requests to the merchant bank (acquirer).
  2. The merchant bank sends the capture package to the payment network.
  3. The payment network forwards the capture package to correct the customer bank (issuer).
  4. The customer bank settles the transactions and transfers the money to the merchant bank (acquirer).
The payment processor does not notify
Cybersource
that the money has been transferred. To ensure that all captures are processed correctly, you should reconcile your capture requests with the capture reports from your processor.

Sales

A sale is a bundled authorization and capture. Some processors and acquirers require a sale transaction instead of using separate authorization and capture requests. For other processors and acquirers, you can request a sale instead of a separate authorization and capture when you provide the goods or services immediately after taking an order.
There are two types of sale processing: Dual-Message Processing and Single-Message Processing.

Capture or Credit Voids

A void cancels a capture or credit request that was submitted, but not yet processed by the processor.
Capture and credit requests are usually submitted once a day, so the window for voiding a capture or credit request is relatively short. A void request is declined when the capture or credit request has already been sent to the processor.
After a void is processed, you cannot credit or capture the funds. You must perform a new transaction to capture or credit the funds. Further, when you void a capture, a hold remains on the authorized funds. If you are not going to re-capture the authorization
and if your processor supports authorization reversal after void,
you should request an authorization reversal to release the hold on the unused credit card funds.
A void uses the capture or credit request ID to link the transactions. The authorization request ID is used to look up the customer’s billing and account information, thus there is no need to include those fields in the void request. You cannot perform a follow-on credit against a capture that has been voided.