That’s the same experience I’ve come to have with contactless over the years.
It’s usually busy cafes, pubs, food stalls, etc, where I think the staff are likely to ‘move you on’ faster than you might - and contactless has almost conditioned people to do that in recent time.
I will say there’s been a few times when I’ve been caught out by SCA - wallet put away, ready to leave - and I do find the frequency of SCA approvals to be really annoying.
Staff training definitely have a gap too - I think there are/were a lot of readers not set up properly yet - and so see “decline”, rather than “enter card” and generally the staff not knowing what SCA is any why they are seeing more declines than before.
Personally it’s driven my use of apple pay up more than ever before, but I do wish the limit gets revisited.
Some of the terminals are so slow to connect and approve that it’s little wonder people get lax at the till - it must drive you crazy waiting for the connection all the time!
It can do. I use the opportunity to make small talk with the customer if I can. Most of my colleagues are OK with it too, but I have seen a few get caught out on occasion. At least they always* fix it in the end, though, albeit with the customer experience being suboptimal.
*on rare occasions they go for a ‘creative’ solution instead of the documented one, which makes reconciling the banking harder.
I’ve had it when shopping at Aldi a couple of times, the 1st was a decline and cashier had to manually start the card transaction again, the 2nd time it declined and asked me automatically to put the card in so think they’ve updated their system at least.
At one of my jobs I don’t let the customer walk away until I know the transaction has gone through, ask them to wait for the authorised message. I’ve had a few occasions where they get all embarrassed saying they have money in their account, I explain the new rules around contactless payments and ask them to try chip and pin
Taking a stab at working out what actually happened here. A lot of pubs and restaurants use mobile PDQs and a good majority of them seem to be set up so that if the transaction goes through it prints a receipt and displays something along the lines of ‘Print duplicate copy? Yes/No’ on the screen.
Trouble is if the transaction gets declined due to SCA, there’s a chance that instead of saying insert card it will print a void receipt and display text on the screen.
If the person operating the device isn’t paying attention then they can quite easily assume that you’ve paid and be left having to explain to their boss at the end of the night why their till is a considerable amount down.
I wouldn’t say it’s your fault in this situation, but personally I would never hand my card to anyone, I always ask staff to bring the machine to me rather than them taking my card away. Also use Apple/Google Pay. It’s more secure than your card, there’s no £30 payment limit and there’s no SCA limit either - that’s all your problems immediately solved!
Out of interest, what is the risk with letting someone else insert the card for you (assuming they are right in front of you and the card never leaves your sight)?
I guess it would be the same risk as handing someone else your wallet as you watch them take the exact amount needed from it, and the wallet never leaves your sight.
It works and it may be safe, but some people would be uncomrfortable with it, especially as it’s completely unnecessary.
It’s not really a customer issue. Sounds like some merchants need to train their staff better.
If you can’t see the card machine screen and the staff member said it’s all gone through and they are being impatient that’s their problem.
I suspect as time goes on the messages explaining the difference between an SCA and other decline reasons will become clearer as the machines are updated.
On Ryanair, 99% of the time in my experience, if you are in a middle or window seat they will explicitly show you the amount on the screen then you pass your card and watch them tap it on the reader. I assume this is so they are not holding the reader in someones face. Seems like a good system for the very limited number of scenarios where you have to hand your card over.
This has happened to me too. thanked for my payment moved on to the next customer I then have had the alert halfway down the road to say it didn’t got through, When I returned to the shop the assistant was confused and then looked back to see it had been declined, Thanked me for my honesty and put it through again.
