Why has my card payment been declined? :(

There are a number of reasons why your card payment may have been declined, but not to worry!

• Some of the card/personal/authorisation details entered do not match the information held by your card issuer. Please make sure that the card-holder address and post code you entered exactly match card-holder address and post code registered with your card issuer. Do not add commas or other punctuation in the address. The house number must be first in 'Address 1', followed by a space.
• You may not have enough cleared funds on your card to cover the amount of the purchase.
• Your card issuer may have referred the transaction for an authorisation code or further identity checks. This is done by the merchant phoning the card issuer when you are paying at a physical PDQ machine but is not possible with an online transaction.
• Your card may have been reported as lost or stolen and been cancelled by your card issuer.
• Your card may be or is due to expire and has been replaced by your card issuer.
• Your card may have recently been replaced by your card issuer but not yet activated.
• Your card may not be allowed to be used in a card-holder-not-present environment (it must be used in person with a pin number).
• There may be a problem with your card issuer's authorisation system, 3-D Secure (Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode)

If you are sure that none of the reasons above apply to your payment attempt, please try again. If the problem persists you should contact your card issuer for further information or give us a call on 01952 290555, we're happy to help wherever we can!

Sometimes a payment may be declined due to a technical problem with the card issuer's authorisation system, 3-D Secure (Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode), and not a problem with the card.

Why was I charged when my order didn't go through?

1. When a transaction is sent to the bank, it first “authorizes” the card for the amount requested (to verify if it is a valid card number and the requested amount is available). The AUTHORIZATION is approved, regardless of what the AVS/CVV response from the bank is.
2. Secondly, the AVS/CVV response is sent back to the gateway along w/ the authorization.
3. There is a difference between an “authorization” and a “capture”, normally the gateway will authorize & capture at the same time. However, since our gateway is set to DECLINE transactions that don’t match AVS or CVV, then the gateway will not capture the authorization if the AVS or CVV response that is received secondarily is NO MATCH. So, if the CVV or AVS fails after the authorization, you will see the “authorization” on their card, and we will see a “Declined” transaction in your gateway reports.
4. Authorizations reserve (ear-mark) the funds for the merchant for 7-10 business days. For example, when you check into a hotel on Friday night, the hotel authorizes funds on your card, but doesn’t capture them until you check out (that’s why hotels have signs at the front-desk that state “Do Not Use Your DEBIT Card for Check-In”). What you're seeing on your online statement is a “pending charge” (i.e., authorization), that will automatically fall off of their account in due time (5-10 business days depending on the card issuing bank), but it was never captured because the gateway does not accept transactions that don’t meet your AVS or CVV rules. We use AVS & CVV to help protect against fraud & chargebacks, and that the AVS/CVV response is unfortunately not known until AFTER the authorization is processed.
5. There is no “refund” or “chargeback” that can occur on an authorization like this. Further, there is “no” transaction to reverse since the transaction was rejected for no AVS/CVV match. Some card issuing banks (Capital One, HSBC etc) may let us CANCEL a pending authorization, but we must call into the card issuing bank with the customer on the line to do this (since the authorization is to protect merchants, the banks won’t let customers cancel the authorization without confirming with the merchant); we can’t guarantee they will cancel the authorization though, and there is no way to cancel an authorization on your end.