This question is two parts: first, can an administrator create an order for a customer? and second, can you then send a payment request email for the registered user to pay (through PayPal or another payment gateway) for a service?
The answer to the first question is simple: Drupal Commerce ships with a full back office system where store administrators can create orders along with products, customer profiles, and even payment requests.
The answer to the second question isn't as straightforward and would likely need its own separate Question in the system. The short answer is that you can process payments in the backend, but it primarily supports on-site payment methods where you can do something like take payment info over the phone. It's harder and not supported yet to send out payment requests and have the payment gateway send the appropriate payment notification to the site once that completes. In that case, what I've done on my site is simply create the order and send a PayPal money request, manually updating the order when I got e-mail notification from PayPal that payment completed.
Regarding the first part of the question about administrator created orders, I would agree that the current setup is robust. However there are always caveats when you start to get into the details of each site's payment setup. These situations might be a good opportunity to writing new features for existing commerce_* contrib.
For discussion sake, lets say that your users are able to save their CC info using a CIM provider. The CIM feature is exposed to the user, not necessarily the admins. At this point the admin would not have access to reuse the stored CIM on subsequent orders.
In a case like this, you could lean on more of a generic and hands on solution such as the masquerade module to allow an admin role to "switch" to that user and create the order. Not elegant, but an option for the OP.
This particular Authnet CIM functionality is exactly what I'm looking for in a Drupal 7 eCommerce solution. It exists in D6 with Ubercart, but disappointingly, I have yet to fine a workable D7 solution with either Ubercart or Drupal Commerce. With both Ubercart and Commerce, it seems like they're *so* close to making it happen, but it just isn't there.
Comments
This makes sense as payment is typically taken over the phone; paypal requests would be nice eventually. Thanks for the insight!
I have a client that processes at least 50% of their orders through a call center. They need to be able to process the order with payment through the admin interface. It would be very helpful to be able to process the payment through the admin order interface.