Rob denies that any seller has been billed twice here:

Rokali says:
To clarify: we did *not* bill anyone twice.

Our new merchant provider has a strange (and bad) way of collecting money from debit cards. They send in a pre-auth and then they send in a request for funds separate from the pre-auth (not as a follow-up to it).

The first pre-auth charge will reserve funds inside your account but the funds will never actually be pulled.

This is apparently something our merchant provider is aware of planning to fix. I wish they’d have told us about it *before* we ran any charges, as the issue did not show up during our testing.

EDIT by starrydesigns

Rokali further explains here:

My post here keeps getting buried so I’m going to lock the thread with an update.

Nobody’s account was double-billed.

Double-billing would mean that we requested the funds twice for a given charge.

This did not happen.

Every charge on a credit or debit card is actually made up of two parts:

1. Ask if the funds are available (this is called a pre-auth, and shows up on your statement as “pending”)
2. Collect the funds as a *follow-up* request to the pre-auth

The time between the two is usually quite short, so you don’t see the Pending phase.

If a pre-auth is not followed up by a collection request, after ~7 days the pending charges disappear completely from your statement.

However, with our new merchant provider, *some* debit cards & their issuing bank, in their interaction with our gateway, did this:

1. Ask if the funds are available (the pre-auth)
2. Collect the amount *as a separate request*, leaving the pre-auth dangling there

Step #2 is what’s causing all the problems, and it’s an issue between our merchant provider and the banks. I’ve spent many hours on the phone trying to find the right solution.

I’ll post an update as soon as I have one. In the meantime please understand what’s actually happening here. This is not a double billing. This is not a double billing.

Posted at 12:58 am, August 2 2007 EST