When you look at an order using a credit card for which you have online credit card processing set up, you will see a control panel at the bottom of the order.

For each order, you can perform authorizations and sales. You may need to edit the amount of the order, in cases of charges for partial shipments or due to adjustments in tax or shipping calculations.

When you make charges or authorizations for an order, an indication of what has been done appears next to the credit card logo.

You can submit only one charge for each order using the Sale button at the bottom of the order page. This helps to avoid accidentally charging customers twice. If you want to adjust charges, use the Manual Transactions page (found in the Process column) to perform a manual transaction.

Clicking Sale processes the sale and the transaction is sent to your financial institution.

Real-time Authorizations

When real-time authorizations are done, you will see a message such as Authorized: AC8124 next to the credit card logo when you look at the order.

Special Transactions

The Manual Transactions link under the Process column allows you to do special or custom transactions. This may be useful if you receive credit card orders in some other way and want to process them through your merchant account, or if you need to perform special charges or refunds.

Using AVS

The AVS (Address Verification System) is a feature of the credit card network which compares the billing address of an order with the address the credit card statement is mailed to. You should be wary of shipping orders for which the addresses don't match. AVS is only available inside the US -- cards issued outside the US will usually report AVS Unavailable.

Both the street address and the zip code are checked. The address match can fail for some kinds of addresses, even when the address is effectively the same. For instance, 123 first st. and 123 1st st. probably won't match.