as druidh says though i believe there is some guideline that suggests it may be unreasonable to take payments at time of order if delivery date is uncertain or extended beyond 2weeks but this may be just in one of the various “acrediting” bodies suggestions
when occasionally customers have complained when things have gone wrong with stock levels and complain credit card debited at time of order i find it useful to point out to customers that is because we use a secure third party merchant to process the transaction and this makes it very secure – no one else has access to cc details to bill at a later date, some companies seem to use pen and paper and temps to do this – incidentally takes about 30seconds to process a credit back so it really annoys me when companies take ages to raise credits for out of stocks
