Unfortunately it's either one or the other, and your best bet is to do an authorized only, and after it expires just try to capture the money, and they should do what's known as a charge (An authorization and capture at the same time). The main issue that you have to tell your client is the following, You won't know if PayPal authorizes the transaction unless you try to authorize the transaction.

So let's say you found a way to store PayPal credit cards manually, you order the merchandise and 4 weeks later you go to authorizes, and it doesn't authorize properly, what happens then?

The only thing about authorizing besides putting a spending limit to the cardholder is the immediate verification from PayPal that it meets their securities and fraud standards, otherwise they will reject the authorization. In my opinion, better to know this now than four weeks later.

Just for the record, we're leaving PayPal, as I found them to be quite dishonest and all over the place. Cannot believe that I am so happy to get back to Bank of America for my credit card transactions.

If you use Authorize.net and something like Bank of America, credit cards could be stored and not on your system, which decreases your liability.

Food for thought, hope some of this helps.

-Ray