x

Payment declined but showing as withdrawn from customer account

We had an issue today with a sale on a tablet device where an error came up about trouble connecting to the internet (in this case a mobile Wi-Fi device) whilst processing a payment of $39 with a option to retry the payment. This happened three times before completely declining the payment. The customer had walked away by this point and I went away to find them. They came back shortly after checking their account and finding that the payment had been withdrawn three times, however on our end there was nothing. 

 

Unsure what to do we tried to process the payment again and it went through and made the decision to refund the customer the rest of the amount that had been withdrawn from their account ($117) in cash. 

 

A similar situation happened again with another sale of $15. After what happened with the previous customer I asked them to check their account, and once again the amount had been withdrawn on their end, but had not come through as a transaction on ours. As far as the customer was concerned they had payed. Unsure why this happened and unsure of what to do we took their contact details and left it at that. 

 

We've tried searching question boards and the FAQ to figure out what happened, and think we might have found an answer, but would like something more definitive as well as if there is a way to contact first the customer to sort out the situation. 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

278 Views
Message 1 of 4
Report
3 REPLIES 3
Square Community Moderator

Hi @Needles_n_Pins,

 

Thanks for writing in and welcome to our seller community, I noticed it's your first post!

 

Our payment processing partner experienced an outage on Saturday which resulted in some payments being declined at point of sale. The charges your customer is seeing on their statements are pending, and will drop off shortly. You can view these transactions via the Transaction Status Report in your Dashboard here.  We understand how important it is never to miss a sale, and take payment disruptions seriously. Thank you for your patience, and we apologise for the inconvenience caused. 

266 Views
Message 2 of 4
Report

Hi Arie, I have viewed my transaction status report from the link you sent me, unfortunately on the daqy it was not possible to do that on the device we were using. Unfortunately not every customer understands that those payments are only pending and as far as they are concerned payment has been made, and or overpaid. On the day we had 7 payments declined. As you would have read on my first message I reimburssed the customer who returned to us showing the amounts deducted three times from her bank account. At a very busy market with limited resourses to investigate and no out of hours contact for square to use the best recourse I had to have a happy customer and no potential scene or complaint lodged with market management I gave her cash for the apparent wrong debits. I would have thought if there was an outage then it should have meant even contact with customers bank shouldn't be possible. In this case I am out of pocket $117 unless the customer is honest when she checks her bank balance and finds that the payments weren't taken out and makes contact with me. This is the first glitch that I have had with square, but to me is quite significant.

259 Views
Message 3 of 4
Report
Square Community Moderator

I understand your frustration having to handle this on top of an already busy day, @Needles_n_Pins. While we're not able to look into transactions via this forum, you can get in touch with our support team on 1800 760 137, who can take a closer look. Our lines are open Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm Melbourne time.

254 Views
Message 4 of 4
Report