How to solve your online shopping problem when your credit card is good
One of the major frustrations on purchasing online is that you have a good credit card but the merchant processing company refuses to process the purchase. You are left stranded not knowing if your transaction gets through or otherwise. You get irritating messages like:
” You have completed your purchases and we will inform you on the outcome of the purchase.” They never did.
Basically, the back end on this processing company has discovered an issue with your transaction but they will NOT tell you about it.
These could be one of the problems they may have:
1) Your location – you may not be based in USA, and some processing companies “blacklist” certain countries
2) Certain credit cards are blacklisted – most don’t realise it, usually from these blacklisted countries.
3) They say your credit card does not tally with the address – I find this to be silly as most people change their residence from time to time . This is usually their standard answer to you
4)They have a system glitch that they are not telling you
5) Zip code, they really like zip codes, so if you are not staying in USA, make sure you put in your actual location (country) of purchase and this zip code thingy will disappear.
6) Emails- certain merchants don’t like “free” emails account so change to one which is paying. Some doesn’t like accounts like hotmail etc at one stage.
So what can you do to successfully complete your purchase?
a) Make sure that you do a screen capture at every page when you do an online purchase, you will
forget what you key in at the second page. Some merchants have countless pages to fill in.
b) Make sure that you contact the main supplier immediately, and preferably call their 1800 line if you are overseas, use skpye.
c)Nowadays major supplier outsourced their processing to third parties and calling their helpdesk is usually not very fruitful, you just need them to give you a ticket number and also your incomplete order number. Then ask them for the actual telephone number of the third party processing company.
d) Contact this third party processing company and tell them to do a “Manual overwrite” on their system for your order number that was given to you by the merchant. This works all the time, even if you are purchasing from outside of the USA.
Enjoy and have a happy experience the next time round you shop on line. Let me know if you have other solutions that will be useful to the readers who come here.