Amazon has a payments problem.
Why did Amazon try to authorize an order FOUR times and “empty” my bank account in the process?
I just wanted a laptop.
My laptop is currently nearing the end of its useful service life. I wanted a new one. Amazon had one I wanted, so I placed an order for a shipped from/sold by Amazon laptop and used the installments feature to spread it out over time.
One charge became two… then three… and almost four.
The first day, the first charge. All was normal.
But then, in the middle of the night on day two… things started going south.
A fourth charge was tried around 6 AM, and didn’t go through at all because because the prior THREE combined with other transactions (not pictured) drained the life blood (aka: available balance) out of my account.
I didn’t do it… Toby did it.
(If you haven’t watched The West Wing, now is a good time to start.)
According to Amazon, they aren’t responsible at all for this. It was my bank declined the transactions.
I talked to my bank. They have no problem with my transactions. If they did, they wouldn’t appear on my account or they would appear with immediate reversals.
Going with the payment flow…
So, four charges must mean that when a charge fails, Amazon systematically retries it. If that’s true, it’s certainly not true in all cases because I only got one email saying my payment declined.
And this email only came after the fourth charge declined. Not after the first, or second, or third charges that allegedly were “denied”.
So, this tells me that the first three charges had a different result than the fourth. Which makes sense because the fourth certainly didn’t go through and the first three certainly did and Amazon is full of bovine excrement.
Not my first rodeo…
Why else don’t I believe Amazon? Because this has happened before.
Yeah… this isn’t the first time I tried to buy this laptop.
That time too I was told that it wasn’t Amazon doing it, it was the bank.
I believed them once.
But not again.
Different banks, different cards, same result.
I don’t think there is a bankers conspiracy to stop me from getting my laptop.
… nor am I the only one doing this dance with Amazon.
Looking at Twitter, it seems this is an ongoing problem with Amazon. A problem they simply refuse to acknowledge exists.
Money is serious business and needs serious engineering.
Why would you retry a payment multiple times before contacting the cardholder anyways? There is a trust when you give a company your card details that they won’t totally screw you over. Retrying a payment so many times violates that trust and is poor system design to boot.
You can get away with one retry or a few retries over the span of several days or weeks, but three in the span of a few hours is entirely unacceptable unless you know the fault is on your end.
Engineers: Check your payments. Don’t be selfish. Think of how your system design may be sending your [ex-]customers into overdraft territory.
Helpless.
Time to start bouncing payments.
The bank won’t remove the authorizations because their policy is that only the merchant can do that.
Amazon won’t/can’t help because no one at Amazon acknowledges there a problem. I look forward to further analyzing this aspect in a future post. (Pro tip: If you are going to have support emails contain the phrase “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company”, you damn well better live up to it.)
