Taking a damage deposit when you cannot hold their card

What you are picturing is a hotel. They freeze an amount on the card, you check out without a scratch, and the money unfreezes. You want that for your dresses, your cameras, your marquee or your power tools.

Shopify does not have it, and several apps describe what they sell in words that sound exactly like it. The gap between the words and the mechanism appears on the day the kit comes back damaged.

There are two mechanisms on sale, and neither one is a hold

Every deposit product that runs through your Shopify checkout is one of these two things. (There is a third route, and it is to take the deposit outside Shopify — see the end of this page.)

Charge and refund. You take the deposit as a real payment and refund it afterwards. It works, and it costs: the customer is out of pocket for the whole hire, and you pay card fees on money you give straight back.

Store the card and try later. Nothing is taken and nothing is frozen. The card details are kept against the order, and when you want the damage fee you attempt a charge.

The second is the one that gets described as a hold, and the most honest vendor in the category writes the correction into its own documentation:

To be clear, this is not a 'card charge authorisation', or 'card hold'. It does not put a hold on the customer's funds.

The same page says what it is instead — "It simply stores the customer's payment method so charges can be attempted at a later date (card vaulting)" — and then states the risk you are carrying:

This does not guarantee the charge attempt will be successful. The customer's card may have been cancelled or not have enough funds available at the time the charge attempt is made.

A second vendor's listing says the same thing in neutral language: a "Stored credit card on file per order", with balances collected by "Auto-charge cards, collect manually, or send invoices". Stored, then charged. Not held.

Bought something advertised as a hold? Describe what you actually need to protect and we will build that instead →

Why Shopify cannot give you a real hold

An authorisation is the thing you want, and Shopify creates them — it just will not keep one alive long enough to cover a hire, nor let you raise it afterwards. Four of its own rules close the door:

Seven days. "Shopify Payments provides an authorization period of 7 days." A two-week hire is already outside it.

Longer holds are Plus, and uneven even there. Extended authorisation is "available only to stores on the Shopify Plus plan that use Shopify Payments", and the length depends on the card: Visa, Mastercard and American Express up to 30 days, Discover and JCB up to 10, Diners Club and China Union Pay still 7. A Plus store still has customers on a one-week clock.

There is no renewal. Shopify's own instruction when an authorisation runs out is not to extend it: "If you have a payment that wasn't captured within 7 days and you don't want to incur this fee, then cancel the order and create a new one." The fee it refers to is real — a manual capture after the seven days carries "a 1.75% charge … in addition to standard credit card fees."

And an authorisation is a ceiling, not a licence. "It isn't possible to collect more money than the value that was initially authorized by the customer." Capture less than you authorised, yes. More, never.

Read that sentence as being about authorisations, because it is, and the difference decides your damage policy. A card stored for later is a different mechanism and is not capped by a figure nobody ever authorised — which is how the rental apps charge a damage fee at all, and how Shopify's own hardware-rental terms work: "The balance of the final invoice will immediately be charged to the renter's credit card on file, without further notice." True either way: adding cost to an order already paid goes out as a new invoice. And charging a stored card a figure decided later carries plan conditions, so treat deposit-and-invoice as always open to you and the later variable charge as the one to confirm for your own plan first.

One last thing, because it generates support email: the hold "might display on the customer's bank statement up to 30 days after the original authorization, even if the payment was captured or the order was canceled."

Merchants have been asking since 2020

The request is specific and it has never been answered:

I'm working on a clients Shopify. My client has a dress rental business. She wants to put a temporary hold on the credit card until the dresses are returned so that she can charge extra if the dress is damaged or returned late.

— AljazV_1, 26 May 2023

That thread is still unsolved. The reply that mattered came from a payments vendor who turned up to say the quiet part: "Partial.ly does not support these features. We are a payment plan service and cannot put a hold on cards."

An older thread asked for the primitive itself —

I am trying to figure out if there is a way to process a credit card auth/hold in Shopify without any 3rd party apps and without changing all payments to "manual".

— natasha87, 23 August 2020

— and was still collecting replies from rental merchants four years later, with no answer. Shopify has shipped nothing for it in that time.

The apps, and what each one is really selling

None of them freezes funds, because nothing running through Shopify checkout can.

And the route that genuinely does freeze funds is the one that leaves. Booqable and its like take the deposit through their own payment account rather than yours — a real hold, on a card your Shopify checkout never touched. It works, and what it costs is the thing it moves: the hire stops being a Shopify order, with everything that follows for your reporting, your discounts and your customer accounts. Worth knowing it exists before you accept that holds are impossible. This page is for the merchants who want to stay.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

You describe the hire the way you run it, and the chasing stops being your Monday. "When the marquee is booked, hold the deposit decision until it comes back; if it is late, add the day rate; if it is damaged, put the figure in front of me before anything is charged, and send the customer the invoice with the photographs attached." That gets built into your store and it stays built.

Two things stated plainly, and both are the platform's shape rather than ours. Nothing in a Shopify checkout freezes funds, so what protects you is which mechanism you pick — and the build is what makes the pick work instead of hoping. Nobody can promise a stored card will still go through; what a build does is make the attempt on your schedule rather than whenever you remember, put the failure in front of you the same hour with the invoice already drafted, and watch the seven-day clock on anything you authorised. And an authorisation is only ever captured downwards, which is a real constraint on the deposit figure — so the build sizes it against your own hire history rather than a round number somebody guessed. How the damage charge itself leaves is settled with you once, not rediscovered on the first bad return.

The late fees, the cleaning charge, the per-day rate after the return date, the deposit ladder by item value, the reminder two days before it is due back — all of that is yours to describe, and a person here has it working in your store within 24 hours.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Chasing damage money after the kit comes back? Describe how your hires run and we will build the rest →