Upcoming payment process changes

On 14 September 2019, regulations for credit card payments in Europe change. This is called Strong Customer Authentication (Wikipedia) and purchases with credit cards might required additional authentication steps during checkout.

As a result, the info-beamer shop will be updated soon to support these changes. For EU customers this means that they might have to go through 3D secure or similar steps before a purchase is completed. Customers from outside the EU will not be affected by that but they also have to use an updated user interface during checkout. The payment button next to your orders looks mostly similar for now:

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Clicking the button no longer opens a modal input dialog box. Instead an inline form allows you to provide your credit card information (this is of course still implemented in a way that info-beamer.com never sees your card information):

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Clicking on the “Pay” button either directly finalizes the payment or opens up an additional user interface required for authentication. How those work exactly depends on how your bank implements the 3D secure step.

In addition, determining whether or not a payment was successful is no longer to be guaranteed to be immediate. Instead our payment provider (stripe) notifies us asynchronously about that status. That should happend pretty quickly, but it might also take a moment. During checkout we still show the user interface while we wait for confirmation.

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If confirmation takes too long, you might now close your browser window when indicated. In any case you’ll be notified by email once your purchase is complete.

For customers using the automated invoicing process, payments at the start of the month will likely fail the first time. You’ll then receive an email telling you to manually complete your purchase. Future automated credit card payments should then hopefully work without explicit and repeated authentication (they are so called merchant-initiated transactions), but that also depends on your bank and a lot of other factors. It’s difficult to predict how that all works, but you can be ensured that no account will be left behind due to a missed payment.

Happy to answer any question you might have.