Yesterday I took my husband to the Prada outlet store for his birthday present. He found something he wanted, so I took it up to the register. I gave them my credit card and showed them my driver’s license to confirm my identity. When they ran my card, they said it was “declined” (the word the store person used) and when she showed me on the little device, it said “canceled.” I thought my ccard company was being their cautious selves because it was a fair amount outside recent spending patterns. So I called them, they said it was not only approved, it was approved twice. Then the store person said that “for our (their) protection” they won’t pass the transaction unless it was not only approved but immediately posted to my account.
Well, there is no way that was going to happen, my bank doesn’t post ccard transactions for a day or two as routine, and the bank person couldn’t do anything about it. So I paid with my debit card instead, which sailed through (and was posted immediately). Note: the store person spoke pretty good English but with a pronounced accent, so I assume English isn’t her first language and that there might have been some misunderstanding due to that. Anyway, I have questions.
Now this immediate posting thing is something new to me. Is there really some scam I could have pulled between approval and posting on my account that would get me out of having to pay (note that I can’t protest a payment until after it has posted anyway)? Can their software really tell whether the charge is posted or not, i.e. does the bank provide that information? Aren’t most banks like mine in that they don’t post immediately? Could this just be a scheme to avoid payments by ccard in favor of debit cards, because the fees are smaller?
This really pissed me off, and I’d like to know what the hell is going on.
I’m thinking that the store person was poorly trained and misinformed. None of what you say she said makes any sense at all.
The only time that my credit card machine says, “Cancelled” is if the transaction was cancelled, either by the merchant or the customer. Sometimes people hit the red button for some unknown reason, or take their card out early, or a couple other things that can cancel the transaction.
If a card is declined, it’s very straightforward, and says declined.
As far as the posted transaction part, that’s just wrong. There is no way for the store to know when or if a transaction is posted to your account. They only know if they get the money, nothing about your bank accounts.
There really is no scam that could be done on your part. You could contest the charges, but you can do that with a debit card as well. The only “scam” that you could be pulling would be that you are using a stolen credit card, but nothing that they are doing here would detect or prevent that.
Like I said, I suspect that what is going on is that the clerk had no idea what was going on.
This can happen in our store system if the card isn’t seated correctly, or the person misreads Do Not Remove Card and takes the card out early. We used to be able to correct it in the back office in the moment, but now we have to wait until close of business when we do the final closeout and reconcile. We can see that the register totals and the Cayan (card software) totals don’t match, and there will be a “sale” that doesn’t actually have an active order associated with it. We than can go in and void the false sale so that our totals balance out and the customer isn’t charged twice.
Our system will say Canceled if there is the same transaction twice in a row - the card co/Cayan won’t allow it. On ours we can cancel the whole sale on OUR end, so the inventory doesn’t get screwed up, and then start the whole transaction over. That’s usually when we have to do a Void later in the evening.
I’ve seen this happen too. Soon after a recent Amazon on-line purchase, I saw the same transaction double-billed (in “pending” status) but a few days later, one posted and one disappeared. Go figure.
Yeah, my from my experience as a former retailer worker, none of us had any idea what was actually going on, and are just repeating things other workers have said.
I used to be the manager of billing and payment systems for a large online company.
First of all, nearly all merchant contracts say that they must not require ID to confirm your identity unless your credit card is not signed. Some stores ask for it anyway but they are not supposed to require it. These merchants are generally ill-informed. It does not protect either you or the merchant. If you present a signed card, and present a matching signature on the receipt, the merchant will get paid even if the transaction turns out to be fraudulent later.
Second, when you present your credit card at a store, they get an authorization code for the amount. Then they run a batch job, usually daily overnight, to settle the authorized transactions. There is no way that a charge is going to post to your account while you are at the point of sale, plus the store staff would have absolutely no way of knowing when it does happen. Your bank posts the transaction as soon as they get it, but it usually takes a day or two.
As you saw, if a charge is authorized but never settled, you may see a pending transaction on your online bank account but it will drop off without a charge. The time it takes to do this depends on your bank’s policy, usually about 3-5 days.
To be fair, my CC signature has never really matched what’s on the card, and it’s even worse since the advent of the touch screens that you sign on, especially when you have to use your finger.
I’m actually trying to remember the last time I did have to sign. Certainly not since COVID, but it seems like it’s been even longer. I never have clients sign either the receipt or the terminal since we reopened after the shutdown. If that ever bites me in the ass, then I’ll start requiring it again.
And by that, of course you mean the CC machine gets those codes. You can see them on the receipt and briefly on the terminal, but it’s all pretty much automated. Running the batch job is simply a matter of pressing a few buttons.
Though it does run the authorization immediately. If you look at your account, it will have funds held in pending pretty quickly after the transaction.
OK, thank you @CookingWithGas for the authoritative background, it matches pretty well with what I’ve been told before. I agree with the last two quotes.
So I’m going to assume that the clerk bobbled the transaction by putting it through twice which caused the second one to cancel, and that’s what she saw. The rest of what she said was probably some nonsense that she made up on the spot to avoid losing the sale. I’m not surprised at all, the clerks in this store never seem to quite know what they’re doing at the register. At least I can blame the store just for poor training, rather than running some kind of game to get a few extra dollars out of the sale or something.
We only have the signature on the touchscreen unit. It doesn’t print out a copy of the signature, and frankly I never actually sign those, I just do a loopy X or a squiggle. No-one cares. I guess I’d care if I lost my card, but that’s why you can cancel it quickly.
Yeah, the importance of the signature seems to be deemphasized since I was doing this, especially now with chipped cards and no-contact cards. Most places I use my card now I don’t need to sign. I haven’t kept up with association policy for signatures since I left the business.
There was a comedian who quipped that he has three signatures, “The careful one, the quick one and the one on the touch screen at the coffee shop which is just a squiggle.”
Though many customers are dumb, clerks should recognize that the average customer sees a few dozen different models of credit card terminal throughout their week. Every single one of them has slightly different rules.
If you wish to use a debit card but do not want to use a PIN (an option commonly available in the US), the action to take varies: some machines say to hit enter without a PIN; others have a “skip” button; still others say “hit cancel”. It’s this last category that probably causes many people to accidentally cancel their transaction on other machines. I have done so myself.
To the clerk, the machine is one and the same every day with very simple rules; to the customer, it’s one of many.
I think this may be a design problem, not a stupid customer problem.
One of the things I see quite frequently on these displays is that the screen will stay static for several seconds with some kind of wait message (I forget exactly what it says), then while you are looking at it waiting, waiting, waiting… it changes to say something else synonymous like “Please Continue Waiting Before Removing Card”. Several times I’ve removed my card prematurely because of this. If your screen already says “wait” and I’m patiently waiting for the status to change, don’t change the screen if there is no change in status and no new information. The customer is anticipating the change in status that occurs 99% of the time, and it’s natural that a screen change would be associated with that.
Yeah, unfortunately, I have limited control over the credit card machine. I complained once to our merchant services provider about how it worked, so they sent an update that made it just not work for a week until we got it all rebuilt, and then it was even less intuitive in use.
I could always try changing CC service, but I have no guarantee that they will do any better.