You don't use auth and capture -- you create a customer (with the card/token) in stripe and then create a charge against the customer.

Having a customer allows you to charge the user without entering in their info each time.

EDIT: I built beaconreader.com which is a crowdfunding site and we use stripe. One thing to note about creating customers is that on the backend Stripe (and other payment providers) tells the banks that it's a recurring charge, even if only charged once, which I believe allows them not to deal with the auth and capture step. I could be wrong, but there's something like that lets processors get away with it.

Hi zmitri: Do you have any more details on how Stripe and banks signal recurring charges. What you're describing sounds interesting, but with our app we see decent churn from the use of debit visa/mastercards

No details whatsoever but I can across this because customers at certain banks asked why their one time charges were showing up as recurring in their bank statements. I emailed in to stripe asking what was up and they let me know it was standard practice to do that, and it would do so if I used a stripe customer.

Presumably the "real" auth will be at the end of the project, which means it could still fail. This is also the case with kickstarter projects right now - typically a few % of your pledges fail and you can't collect the money from them.

I'm fairly confident that they will simply tokenize credit cards/customers and use that info to process the charge once the project has succeeded.

This could result in the funds not being available when the payment is submitted, but is still a much cleaner implementation and does not require that you hold funds and leave the period at the mercy of the bank.

I'd also like to know about this. The only way Stripe can provide the functionality needed by Kickstarter is to change the capture period to 90 days (campaign length), which was something that Amazon did as a one-off change for Kickstarter.

From what I'm aware, authorization times are subject to the issuing banks. Some are valid for up to 30 days.

Further, MC and VISA regulations explicitly forbid charging a customer when a product is not sent within 30 days.