Well we have one site with only 5 Ss bays and it works fine with their new pre-auth required code and single coordinator. But at two other locations that code won’t work for some reason there is conflicts with the auth packets when they get back to the coordinator where they fail sometimes and don’t get back to the auto swipers mainly. These sites are both with 6 Ss bays, 6 vacs, and 2 WS2 Unitec autocashiers all with swipers on them that are fairly busy though. We’ve been working on this for over a couple of years with them as you can see from the first post when we realized this gap existed and it’s finally working. By default their system does not require the pre auth packet back from the merchant. It attempts to get it but still turns the bay on if it doesn’t get back in time which is how it works when the internet is out. Also, that’s how it will turn on your bays with a card that has no money on it as well. If you separate out the auto cashiers on the 2nd coordinator the pre auth required code seems to work so far it’s been a couple of months. It works at the small site with one coordinator too. How Tom explained it to us was basically like a traffic jam in the single coordinator causing total failure of that packet or a delay so long that it always declined the customer because it could never get back to swiper head in time. That is with bumping the delay time from standard 8-13 seconds up to 20 seconds too. So we are still working with him to design a better solution (maybe a rolling pre auth). But for us, we have bill acceptors,
coin,
token, and gold/silver dollar acceptance, attendant with a square card reader plugged into smart phone that can take their card and start bag...so there are plenty of ways for the customer to pay if the internet is out or if their card is declined and we do not want to turn on bays in hopes that when the
transaction batches out the customer has enough money there if the pre auth packet doesn’t make it back in time. This is the only
credit card system I’ve ever seen which doesn’t require pre auth. It’s not like we are asking for something out of the ordinary, it’s just a basic
credit card system function.
