Bloom club memberships payments are different than standard website orders placed through your Shopify store. Here's how:
- Bloom saves credit cards because club memberships recur. Saving cards in Bloom's PCI-compliant gateway, Authorize.net, makes it easy to re-process memberships, or for members to quickly purchase wines using their saved information. So, Bloom payments are processed using saved credit cards.
- Shopify doesn't save customer credit cards. The vast majority of customers who purchase from small businesses online, only make a single purchase. It doesn't make sense to save cards for all these single-purchase customers and take on the liability and cost of protecting cards from hackers.
- Both Shopify and Bloom payments are processed through the same Authorize.net Gateway. Remember, card numbers aren't saved if the order was through the Shopify website, but are saved if they are Bloom club member orders. Shopify can't refund Bloom orders because it won't interface with saved credit cards for security reasons.
If this is confusing. Let's break it down:
- All orders (website or club memberships) will be processed through the same secure Authorize.net payment gateway. You will capture payments and fulfill orders exactly the same for both types of orders. If you don't have to process refunds, then all's groovy.
- To refund or cancel a website order, just use Shopify's refund feature. It's easy.
- Wine club orders created by Bloom are a bit different. First, you'll need to refund payments through the gateway, using the member's saved credit card. Then you need to refund through Shopify just like a website order. It's a two-step process instead of a single step process like website orders.
We're planning on building a Bloom order refund feature to make member orders easier to refund.