Introducing Guest Vaulting for Braintree

Supporting payment workflows for guest orders

BigCommerce has launched an open beta that enables automatic credit card vaulting for guest shoppers, giving you a provider token for every order, with no customer account required.

If you sell products with long fulfillment windows, or if your downstream systems handle payment capture outside of BigCommerce, you've likely run into this challenge: authorization holds expire, guest orders go un-vaulted, and your team is left chasing reauthorization or finding workarounds just to collect payment for an order that was placed weeks earlier.

Until now, BigCommerce could only vault cards for logged-in customers, leaving out the vast majority of shoppers who check out as guests. That gap often required expensive third-party tools or unsupported workarounds, making it more difficult to support complex fulfillment operations.

Automatic vaulting for every checkout

You can now join the open beta to enable automatic credit card vaulting for all shoppers through our native Braintree integration, including guests. When enabled, a provider-side token is created for every credit card used at checkout, regardless of whether the shopper is logged in to a customer account.

Tokens are securely stored by the payment provider and are intended to support downstream fulfillment workflows, such as reauthorization and delayed capture, rather than build a guest shopper payment profile. You can retrieve provider tokens directly or through the dedicated field on the List Transactions endpoint (available by request).

What this means in practice:

• Long fulfillment windows: Reauthorize payments in your ERP using the stored token when you're ready to capture funds, without having to contact the shopper again.

• External payment processing: Pass the provider token to your downstream system and handle payment capture there.

These capabilities can be used together. Logged-in customers can still choose to save cards for future purchases, while every shopper's card is vaulted automatically to support your fulfillment workflows.

Shopper transparency, built in

When guest vaulting is enabled, BigCommerce's native checkout automatically displays a short notice at the payment step, informing shoppers that their card details are being securely stored as part of the order fulfillment process.

If you're using a custom checkout or building your own payment flow through the Payments API, you'll be responsible for that client-side experience. This includes adding equivalent messaging to your checkout or app. We recommend doing so to keep shoppers informed and align with privacy best practices.

How to enable it.

Head to your Braintree configuration page in the Control Panel and look for the new vaulting setting in the Stored Credit Cards section, marked with a Beta flag. The setting is off by default, so you can opt in when you're ready.

The final word

Guest vaulting is available today for Braintree (open beta) and Stripe OCS (generally available), with support for additional payment providers to follow.

Guest shopper vaulting supports credit cards only. Guest shoppers cannot view or reuse saved cards in your store. Tokens are created only to support merchant fulfillment operations within the context of the original order, in line with applicable privacy regulations.

To explore additional beta programs and early access opportunities, visit the Commerce AI Labs Early Access Program.