This is strange…I bought a film on iTunes last night which was £9.99. £13.48 was taken from my account (love how instant the notification was - still amuses me!).
I’d understand if this was the first time I’d used my card, and it’d be an active card check, but it isn’t. I’ve messaged support to check their advice, but in the meantime has anyone had this?
had you bought anything else recently that hadn’t yet been charged? I’ve purchased something in the week that hasn’t been charged yet, guarantee if I was to buy something else on iTunes now it would process them both together in one.
Have you paid £3.49 for something else, recently, and both charged have come through on the same invoice? Have you checked the emailed invoice from a Apple?
iTunes doesn’t bill you immediately for every purchase through iTunes or the App Store. They like to bulk up purchases, I guess to reduce card processing fees.
The consequence is that iTunes sometimes bills you for amounts that are not the cost of the most recent thing you bought. This usually happens when you buy several things at once, or there’s a subscription cost at roughly the same time.
Not that I know of, but I’ve got family Apple Music subscription with my parents and sister so their purchases come off my account, but they’ve not said anything, and the receipts from Apple seem to take ages
I’ve had all sorts of wierd charges from apple. It seems to sort itself out in the end usually by a sudden refund. Last time I bought something they took an extra £1.48 then refunded it a week later.
Seems a bit shoddy? Randomly charging customers accounts then refunding it
iTunes Store -> Account -> Purchase History -> See All will list all of your purchases, highlighting the recent purchases that have been made.
iTunes is a bloody pain to be honest. A combination of card checks and the fact that they bulk up payments so you don’t really know what each payment is for without checking your email for the invoice.
If you spot a charge you don’t think should be charged, they are usually pretty good at refunding with few questions asked, I just periodically check here: https://reportaproblem.apple.com and just scan through charges.
If it was £1.58 then that was an iTunes active card check.
OMG How did I not know about this website!? It’s totally resolved my problem - they’d grouped two charges together.
Thank you so much!!!
The thing with iTunes transactions is that they do bundle them up but also that Apple charge you a day before the send you the receipt by email! 
Even I get caught out sometimes when I buy an app the day before my Netflix subscription renews through iTunes. 
This throws me every time and it’s always genuine and just something I have forgotten.
iTunes are indeed unusual in their card charges, not to mention the active card checks - if you log into a new device they ask you to verify the card and charge you 1,58£ for a card check which they actually take (it’s not just an authorisation) and refund a week or so later.
iTunes is positively transparent compared to the way Amazon splits payments up for multiple purchases with no correlation to shipping or anything! Drives me nuts sitting there cross checking items with shipments and payments. Grrr!
My favourite Amazon trick is still where they’ll split and recombine multiple orders made at completely different times into a “shipping optimised” set of boxes over multiple days. Not too bad but irritating when one of the orders needs to be given to another person as a complete set!
There is correlation?
So, anything that is sold by Amazon or held in a Amazon warehouse will be put into one charge. Then, for each 3rd party seller you will get an individual charge for their item depending on when they ship it etc.
I wish that were borne out by empirical evidence - I have none!
To wedge this into Monzo… this is exactly the kind of thing it would be good to see third party integrations on further down the line. As someone has suggested in other threads, PayPal could be interrogated with transaction numbers to better populate the description. Amazon similarly.
Agreed. My evidence is purely anecdotal and by observing the charges.
Agreed! This would be awesome and given the infrastructure (internet…) is there… 
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