Preauthroization

The primary objective of this project is to implement a Card Present pre-authorization payment workflow on the R-series platform via Lightspeed Payments.

Company

Lightspeed

Tools

Miro

Figma

Role

UI Designer

UX Designer

Researcher

OVerview

This initiative specifically targets the operational needs of rental businesses, such as bicycle and sporting goods rentals, who require the ability to verify a customer’s ability to pay without immediately collecting funds.

By bridging this feature gap, the project aims to generate approximately $30 million in incremental Gross Payment Volume (GPV) through a combination of reduced merchant churn and the acquisition of new accounts

PRoblem

Currently, nearly 10% of R-series merchants operate in the rental sector and face significant challenges because a pre-authorization feature is not available on R-series or Lightspeed Payments. This deficiency forces these businesses to charge customers the full amount upfront and issue refunds later, which creates a poor experience for both the merchant and the consumer.

This manual workaround often leads to missed sales opportunities and higher churn rates as merchants seek competitors who offer these standard industry capabilities. Furthermore, rental customers often find it inconvenient to provide physical collateral like passports when they would prefer to simply have a temporary hold placed on their funds.

USER interview INsights

I conducted several interviews with my team and documented some of the merchant’s pain point that arise:

“Unfortunately, there's a lot of fraud when it comes to rentals of equipment. And, you know, people are able to make fake IDs, they're able to get, you know, bad credit card numbers or things like that. And so having a way that we can, like authorize the card and hold an amount that's like, actually substantial, I think is really a key thing”

Pictureline, California

“When we do a rental we have to take all the info in Lightspeed then we have to send that info to Hubtiger we do the rental then we need to make the payment on the. The Clover machine which doesn't give us a real confirmation on Lightspeed or Hub Tiger that it's been done.”"Well, as I said, we're actually taking a photocopy of the credit card so we just input the information manually at the moment.That's, that's not a method I'm very confident and very in agreement with, but it's the best we have for now so that's why we're using it.”

Outiliage, Québec