What is Deferred and Release?

DEFERRED and RELEASE is a payment type offered by Sage Pay which allows you to hold onto an authorised transaction, without taking any funds immediately from your Shopper's card and then send it for settlement at a later date.

For a Deferred transaction, our system obtains an authorisation at the time of the transaction, in exactly the same way as a real-time payment. A 'shadow' is then left on your Shopper's card for a certain period of time to reserve funds for that particular transaction, ensuring that the Shopper cannot spend the funds on anything else.

A Deferred transaction will not be sent for settlement until requested. This gives you a period of time in which to review the order or your stock and once you are ready to ship your goods and obtain the funds, you simply Release the authorised transaction for settlement.

A Deferred transaction will remain active for 30 days for you to Release. However, the bank's authorisation 'shadow' will usually only remain active for up to 6 days. This is dependant on the bank / card issuer as some banks / card issuers only shadow cards for 24 hours and others for 14 days. It is recommended that you Release transactions ASAP, ideally within 48 hours. Any transactions released outside of this time cannot be guaranteed as the customer may have reached their card limit or cancelled their card. Debit cards and credit cards have different shadow periods with debit cards generally having the least time shadowed.

Once a Deferred transaction has been authorised and sent for settlement, the transaction process has been completed and cannot be reverted. As far as your Shopper is concerned, they will be expecting the funds to be taken as usual.

The benefits of processing a deferred payment

Deferred payments can prove useful in the following situations:
•   If you stock goods that might not yet be available - deferred payments can be used as the   Shopper may purchase a product from your website even though you may not have   them in stock.
•   If the value of the order changes after the Deferred transaction has been processed, the transaction can be Released for any amount up to the amount of the original transaction.
•   If you wish to make further fraud prevention checks and/or see the full fraud screening results   of the transaction before you decide whether or not to accept the transaction and ship   the goods.
•   If you wish to check for duplicate orders before authorisations are forwarded for   settlement.

The Limitations of Processing deferred payments

•   Even though Deferred transactions will remain active for 30 days on our system, if your ordered stock is delayed we cannot guarantee that you will receive the funds if the authorised transaction is not released within the card shadowed period. i.e. as a general   rule within 6 days of the transaction taking place. If your goods take longer than a few days to be ordered, you should consider using the AUTHENTICATE payment type instead.
•   You can Release only once and only for an amount up to and including the amount of the original Deferred transaction.
  All Deferred transactions must be released in order for you to obtain the funds which can delay your cash flow process