My card will not work - what's going on?
The most common reason for transactions being denied is address verification. If the billing information you submit does not match the information on file with your financial institution, the charge will be rejected. We recommend that you contact your financial institution and review your account information before attempting further transactions.
My credit card statement says I've been charged more than once for my order! What's up?
99% of the time, YOU HAVE ONLY BEEN CHARGED ONCE. This is an extremely frustrating situation for our customers as well as the eCommerce industry. This problem is attributed to the way that banks verify billing information and reserve funds from consumers for online transactions. The financial industry requires fund verification/fund reservation BEFORE address verification occurs. It works like this:
You enter your credit card information into the payment page and submit for payment
Your bank or credit card company is contacted to see if your funds are available.
If funds are available, the bank or Credit Card Company authorizes the amount, and reserves that amount and attaches an "authorization code" to the amount.
AFTER the funds are verified, your name, address, and billing info is then sent to a separate Address Verification System (AVS) for validation. This is completely to protect your security and privacy. It's a fraud check against your credit card information.
If you entered any incorrect billing information, the AVS system rejects the verification and you are instructed to correct your billing information.
The Result: because the funds are reserved, banks assume your card will eventually be charged for each attempt. A new and unique authorization number is granted for a charge on every attempt.
EngineerSupply WILL NOT ACTUALLY CHARGE THE AMOUNT!
The Problem: The financial industry requires fund verification/holding funds before address verification occurs. There has already been an authorization granted and funds held on the first payment attempt! This can happen over and over again - resulting in multiple authorizations/fund reservation, regardless of whether an order actually gets through.
EngineerSupply.com has absolutely NO CONTROL over the fund verification/AVS process or this problem.
The Solution: eCommerce is a new frontier and many of the problems and legal issues still need to be ironed out. Financial institutions are continually working to better the process, and we are always reviewing our own procedures. We try very hard to make our customer experience enjoyable, efficient, and easy. We believe the current process of authorization before AVS should be reversed and allow AVS to complete before any money is reserved.
So what happens to those extra charges on my account?
Your bank should be able to recognize the extra transactions on your account as authorizations and not charges and remove the hold on those funds. If you do nothing, the authorizations will expire, but the time of expiration is determined by each financial institution and is not uniform. The best bet is to contact your financial institution and work with them to remove the extra authorizations before expiration.