I have had a customer who wanted to purchase few items from my online store but his credit card got declined. He tried 4 different card but all got declined. Customer e-mailed me to ask why all his card is getting declined through our store and if we are not running a scam. we politely suggested customer to get in touch with his credit card provider and let us know and in mean time he can choose to pay through PayPal. I have checked the abandoned cart and the customer payment details. Everything is in order and customer has confirmed that he has more than enough fund in his to buy all my products in the store.
Customer rang his card provider and was told by the Bank that payment from this gateway has been flagged as a fraud and now he don’t even want to try PayPal to make any purchase from our online store as he has lost trust on us. I never had any issue before and now all of a sudden when I was expecting to get some big sale after spending money on advertisement and other marketing stuff my Shopify payment gateway has been flagged as fraud. I am absolutely furious.
Can you give me the valid reason as why this is happening and can Shopify solve this issue? Now I have lost sale, I have lost customer who is well known in the community and is never going to come back to my store again and probably my potential customer within his circle as well. If this is issue is not resolved I will keep loosing my valuable customer and money. I won’t be able to run my store and will leave me no choice other than than to shut my Shopify store down and find other platform.
I have tried to check if the Shopify payment is working properly through test mode and all seems to be working fine. I need solution and answer as to why Shopify payment gateway has been flagged as a fraud and can Shopify guarantee that it will not happen again?
Same error message for the other 3 credit cards for the same customer and all his Credit card provider said the same thing " Payment Gateway for this transaction has been flagged as a FRAUD"
First off, I definitely understand the concern here and I’d love to help clear things up.
When customers receive the do_not_honor decline code, this comes from the cardholder’s end, rather than Shopify’s. Since Shopify Payments is powered by Stripe, I took a look into this specific decline code over on Stripe’s website. There, the description for the decline code indicates that “The card has been declined for an unknown reason” and that “The customer needs to contact their card issuer for more information”. Stripe has further information on this particular decline code here.
Declines like these 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.
It’s quite odd to hear that the bank flagged your payment gateway as fraud, since Shopify Payments is a popular payment gateway with full PCI compliance. It’s also powered by Stripe, one of the world’s leading payment gateways. While I really do understand the stress and concern around this situation, I do want to assure you that this issue is very likely unrelated to your store.
As a side note, I just want to let you know that I’ve removed the screenshot from your post. Although it’s quite helpful in this situation, it does contain some sensitive information and I just want to make sure that it’s not publicly visible.
I hope this clears things up, but I’m curious to know if any other customers have received the same issue. Feel free to respond here and let me know.