Credit cards being declined due to "Do Not Honor"

[Diane_Scaman]

Hi,

I'm having a lot of customers contact me saying their credit card is declined. The error code is "Do Not Honor", which seems to be due to their bank seeing the charge as fraudulent. Once they call their bank and process the order again, it goes through. But I'm sure I'm losing a bunch of sales from people who don't contact me or want to bother calling their bank.

I've been directing these customers from Shopify to my Etsy store, and their card works just fine there.

I (and my bank) am based in Canada, and most of my customers are from the USA, which I'm sure is a big part of the problem.

I contacted chat support about this, but chat support always seems to just google the problem and regurgitate what they find in the forums  🙊

Questions:
1. How can I fix this?
2. If it can't be 100% fixed, is there a way to edit the error message so that the customer knows to call their bank?

3. Is there a way to sort my abandoned checkouts to see the ones with card errors?

Thanks!

[Ryder]

Hi there, @Diane_Scaman!

Ryder here, from the Social Care Team at Shopify. Thanks for posting! I'm sorry to hear about this trouble your customers are experiencing, but I'd be happy to see how I can be of assistance today.

I'd like to first clarify, are your customers using Shopify Payments or PayPal when attempting to purchase? Is it them seeing the "Do Not Honor" error code, or are they seeing a "There was a problem processing your payment" error?

"Do Not Honor" error code is a 0500 PayPal error code. The Terminal Report for the 0500 error is "Declined - Contact Issuing Bank for Additional Details", meaning that your customers would need to contact their bank in order to resolve the issue. If you feel as though it may not be related to the individual customers, and something related to PayPal, then you can try contacting PayPal directly for more information.

If your customers are using Shopify Payments, you will be able to find out more information in the Timeline of the individual Order or Abandoned checkout. By clicking on the "Unable to process a payment for $XX.XX USD on the (card type) ending in XXXX." message, you'll be able to find related details of the failed transaction.

Declines can happen for a number of reasons. Banks have automated systems that determine whether or not to accept the charges that we submit to them. These systems take various signals into account, including the customer’s spending habits, account balance, and card information like the expiration date and CVV. Even if all of the card information is correct, and your customer previously had a successful payment, a future charge can still be declined by a bank’s security and fraud systems as these signals are always changing.

The information shown to you in the Order or Abandoned checkout Timeline is all the information we receive directly from the customer’s bank about a decline. Depending on the error code displayed, we might not have much information as to why a charge was specifically declined. If all of the card information seems correct, it is best to have the customer contact his or her bank, inquire for more information, and ask for future charges to be accepted.

It's often best to have customers contact you first, so that you can look into the Timeline and confirm whether the issue indeed related to their bank before having them contact the bank. Because this information is being sent straight from the banks themselves, there isn't a way to edit the message specifically related to the "Do not honor" code. You can, however, edit the message your customers see in relation to any decline error in your Admin by going to Online store > Themes > Actions > Edit languages > Checkout & system. There's a few different fields there that you can find to edit such messages, but they won't be distinguished by the error code.

At this time, there isn't a way to filter your Abandoned checkouts by error codes, but I can understand how this would make processing more efficient for you. If you'd like, I can send you an email to follow up and submit a feature request on your behalf. This doesn't guarantee the feature, but it helps us learn what our merchants want. All our feature requests are addressed based on popularity, so the more feedback we hear regarding a subject, the higher of a priority it becomes for our Development Team to find a solution. Please let me know if this is something you'd be interested in!

Cheers.

[BoujieVanity]

I’m confused, is it on my end that it’s declined or the customer?

I need help ASAP 😩

[Xandrea]

Same issue. Have you resolved it?

[Ryder]

Hey, @BoujieVanity and @Xandrea!

The error message in the payment event of your order's timeline refers to your customer's card decline. In this case, it's best to advise your customer to speak with their financial institution to see what might've caused the decline.

It looks like your customer tried to checkout through the Shopify Payments gateway in that screenshot, @BoujieVanity. Because Shopify Payments is powered by Stripe, you can refer to their Customer card declined when processing payment guide for more information. 

If you have any failed payouts you'll see this error message on the Admin Home page:

and this error message on your Settings > Payments > Shopify Payments > View payouts page. 

I hope this helps! Please let me know if there's anything I can clarify. 

Cheers.

[slim1]

Hello Ryder/shopify...I just read through the Q&A and noticed all questions and answers where not so recent and I just received the same Do Not Honor error message through my payment gateway which is Paystack. Have Shopify figured something out regarding this issue because it is kinda weird telling all customers to call their bank. Anyway let me know how best to handle this

Thanks

[Ryder]

Thanks for letting me know you're using Paystack, @slim1. With a quick Google search, I was able to find their documentation advising the same definition for the "Do Not Honor" code:

Do not honor’ is an error response sent by a customer’s bank when they decline a transaction for reasons best known to them, or when a restriction has been placed on a customer’s account.

This error is very common with international transactions where a customer's bank blocks their transactions attempts from being successfully processed until they can verify that their customer is the one initiating the transaction.


@xws, you mentioned that your customer was based out of the United States. This decline is common with international purchases, as it can be meant to safeguard the customer from unknown or atypical purchases. Nevertheless, you'll want to advise your customer to speak with their bank to determine the cause of the decline.

I can appreciate that the decline in conversion rate is concerning, @mackattack. As mentioned above, there are several reasons that this error response is received, and it is ultimately the message that we are receiving from the customer's financial institution. Are the customers experiencing these local or international? If they're international, you could consider targeting a local market to avoid such instances. Otherwise, I would recommend looking into other ways you can increase your conversion rate.

Cheers.

[mackattack]

Did you mange to find a fix for this? I have just recently noticed that alot of my customer is getting this exact problem. My conversion rate has dropped from around 4,1% down to 2,3% so this is probably something a lot of customers are having troubles with. Shopifys support didn't mange to find anything at all but there's obviously something going wrong here.

[xws]

Me to

I Have use UK Shopify payment，My customer is from the United States。Many of my orders failed to pay and do not honor

how to solve this problem