Anyone else having problems with Visa Vanilla cards not working at pos checkout? We’ve taken them for years and now suddenly, none work. Even after veryifying the cards’ balance myself.
8 Likes
We cannot accept them either and I have been scouring the internet for an answer on how to accept them. We have lost sales due to this issue and it is so frustrating.
2 Likes
I am trying to report this to them now as this is horrible. We have turned away at least 10 sales in the past 5 days because we cannot accept the card. I don’t remember having an issue in the past.
2 Likes
Nothing from them yet?
1 Like
Same issue as well. Here is the response I received when I reached out:
So, I want to give you a bit of background on this one. Long story short, Shopify Payments (your payment gateway) is totally able to process all sorts of gift cards, however, we can’t provide a 100% guarantee that they will be successful.
Now, the reason for this is because the vast majority of these cards actually have the ability to have a zip code/billing address attached to them, and it’s up to the card holder to fill out those details. In other words, your customer should definitely register the card (and their address) with the gift card provider directly. Also, this is just one of the many reasons pre-paid cards might not function as expected all the time.
With all that said, in your case, there’s one other thing you could do to cover all your bases. If you head to your Shopify Admin → Settings → Payments → Manage (across from Shopify Payments) and scroll to the Fraud Prevention section, you will find some options to decline charges. Basically, with those options selected, any card that doesn’t have a postal code/zip code attached with be declined. Check it out:
It was emphasized that Shopify can not guarantee the payment will be successful and to encourage the customer to contact the card’s information # for further assistance if the problem persists.
1 Like
So their reply to you is total BS since my settings have those boxes checked off (it’s also POS not online) and I am still having this issue. Plus, they haven’t even gotten back to me yet after over a week. Sounds like they have NO idea.
5 Likes
One of our staff found a workaround to get some of these charges to work at POS. Basically, Shopify can’t tell how much is on the card, so if you charge over the card amount, it declines. If you get the exact balance for the card, and charge $0.01 UNDER the balance, it should go through.
1 Like
Us too - 2 cards this week we either have to turn them away or we keep Square as a backup in case any readers go down and run it through our Square reader and works fine.
1 Like
Have they given you any updates? They basically blamed Visa and said they don’t plan to do a thing about it.
1 Like
We are having the exact same issue
The Shopify Software techs need to come stand in front of the 13-year-olds trying to spend their Visa Gift Card birthday money and being declined until they get this figured out. It’s heart-breaking and losing us money to boot. They told us the same thing that others have posted here, “cannot guarantee all pre-paid credit cards will work”. NOT COOL SHOPIFY! - Mandi (manager Grumpy Bob’s)
1 Like
I’ve given up ANY hope that they care about anything. They recently BROKE the photo system now when attaching photos to a variant the photos are displayed to you in a random jumbled up order and it’s become near-impossible to add our unique inventory, they simply do not care and refuse to fix it or roll it back and actually check to make sure things work before making changes. They still haven’t fixed this Visa issue after 6 months, too. They do not care, at ALL.
This still doesn’t work for me with the Vanilla cards specifically. It will work with any other gift card, not Visa Vanilla though 
1 Like
This is still an issue. I’m questioning why we need to turn off a fraud security feature - for all payment types - in order to accept a common method of payment? We’re having issues at our POS with vanilla gift cards, and just lost a sale because of it.
I’m having the exact same issue. Just lost another sale because the customer had a Vanilla Visa Gift card. Had numerous issues after Christmas last year, was hoping a solution had been found
1 Like
I’ve been having this problem as well (well over a year since the original post). On the first attempt, I get a “card details are incorrect” message, and then when I re-enter everything, it just declines it.