I’ll try to make this brief. We recently extracted our club member credit card data from Authorize.net, went live with Vin65 and USA epay. Of course, after the usual delays, we had to do a club run just a couple of days later. We had high rate of declines in this run. We’re working with the guys at Change Merchant solutions to figure out why so many cards that should be good, and that we’ve charged before failed. The problem is when we try to process a declined member, Vin65 is creating a duplicate declined order with a new number. I swear I don’t remember this happening at my previous winery with Vin65, but we had a really low decline rate (and a small club), and I just emailed or called to get a new card. Has anyone seen this happen? I don’t want to create more undeletable pending orders if I can help it.
I have submitted a ticket, but not really expecting a response anytime soon.
Often times when you switch merchant processors (and immediately run huge batches), a large percentage of your authorizations will trigger fraud alerts, especially with American Express. Because we sell alcohol, wineries are categorized as higher risk and charges from accounts with no or little activity will often throw up flags with the banks. Just work with your customers to get through this and subsequent Wine Clubs will be irie.
When you are running Wine Clubs out of the batch processing tool, it will create a new order every time you try to re-process a declined member. If they continually decline, you’ll have a long list of “pending” orders in their account history. Understandably, this is jarring if you came from a system that just tries to reprocess the original order. Not the case in Vin65. Accept this as your fate and move on, it has few negative side effects other than looking sloppy.
Thanks for your reply. The credit card processing side of things has ben interesting to say the least. More settings were changed on their end and we got a few more to go through. We thought it might be wise just to let the first round of updater attempts go through, and then we’ll send the decline emails.
On the club side, it makes sense that since the club processing tool doesn’t create order numbers when you create the batch, that every time you attempt from that tool, a new order number is created. The documentation on the subject is a little vague… but I understand, normally, we shouldn’t be re-attempting declines multiple times without getting new card info.
I also don’t remember Vin65 creating a duplicate order when I ran club charges at another winery many years ago but we just recently started using Vin65 at this winery and it’s not ideal. We have a very large wine club and when we send out the declined credit card notices after the first attempt there are quite a few updates done online through their accounts. It only makes sense to attempt a new batch charge on all the declined credit cards again because it’d be faster than attempting to charge their order one by one as we get the email notifications about their updated accounts. I was hoping the duplicate order thing was something that could be turned on or off but it doesn’t sound like it.
The biggest problem we are running into is that from the POS side, the employees now see multiple “Declined” orders that they have to choose from when a customer comes in the tasting room, updates their credit card, and would like to receive their wine. Please let me know if this is incorrect or if others do it a different way, but the employee would update the club members credit card through the POS (ipad), then when they go into Manage Contact > Orders > Show Pending, they would select the declined order from the list > process order> which then brings up that order in the POS in which you can now charge and finalize the order. It’s confusing the the employees because now they see multiple “Declined” orders listed any they might think they need to complete all of these.
I’m still don’t quite understand why it’s forced to create a new order. Other systems I’ve used never had to, How do others manage their credit card update, charge and pickup from the POS side after they’ve done multiple charge attempts? Anyone else experience issues?
This is a good takewaway. It has been pointed out already in this thread, but it really is true that you just need to learn to remedy the pending orders you can, and otherwise totally ignore them. I launched with Vin65 last year and pending orders gave me lots of anxiety. I have learned since then that the trail of clues one or more pending orders can leave is better than not having them at all. I for one appreciate that the system will create a new order each time, for that reason.
This is just training, and they only need focus on the last declined order. Their visual cue is that the multiple declines are for the same amount each time.
Your strategy to re-run all is sound, because it also picks up people who have paid their bill or recharged their debit card.
What @danjimerson said about the trail of clues is spot on.
