How can I capture funds using a Saved credit card

Question

I need to accept pre-orders on my Magento site however the orders will remain on hold for longer than 30 days which means that I cannot pre-authorize the credit cards because the pre-authorization would expire.

I understand that I can save credit cards on my Magento site which will allow us to bill the credit card when we need to.

The problem is that when I do save credit cards, I'm not sure how to bill the credit cards (using PayPal) without going order by order and manually copy/pasting the thousands of credit card numbers one-by-one into PayPal Manager. Does anyone have any ideas how I can accomplish what I need to?

PS: After the pre-orders are done, I would plan to change the encryption key so that the data becomes unreadable.

Answer 1

You should never save credit card numbers or any other sensitive data in Magento or on your server (read about PCI DSS). There are payment gateways that allows tokenization of cards that will save the credit cards on their servers securely and give you a "token" which you can use to access the card. You can charge the card at any time you want, as they will be "saved" in Magento. They're usually called "CIM". Authorize.net, Cybersource, etc. have it.