Twice now, I’ve been to my local Tesco garage and bought a few items, payed with my mondo via contactless, and then been told by the cashier that the transaction didn’t go through.
The first time, I felt a buzz from the phone in my pocket, showed the cashier the notification, and protested that the transaction had indeed gone through. He looked quite confused, but let it go.
This happened again yesterday (same shop, different cashier, also told me my contactless transaction had not gone through), although this time I didn’t check my phone, and paid with my regular bank card. Later I saw on my phone that the transaction was also on my mondo card. So I had paid twice.
I don’t think the merchant is trying to rip me off - different cashiers, and they both seemed certain about the mondo transaction failing. So is there something going on with the interaction between you and the merchant? Seems like some kind of bug on sombody’s end.
The amount was only a few pounds, but it’s a bit unsettling nonetheless.
Just for some context for anyone else interested, this happens occasionally when messages get ‘lost’ between the point of sale machines, our processor’s systems and our systems. @tom wrote a great post on this last year: https://getmondo.co.uk/blog/2015/12/02/3-second-sandwich/
The transaction is authorised and therefore appears in your app. At some point in the process, it then gets declined/doesn’t go through but that message doesn’t reach our systems and so we don’t display it. You then have what we call a ‘hanging auth’ that will automatically clear after 10 days (and our customer support team can do it manually if you want the money back sooner)
Lots of room for improvement in this process, both on our end and throughout the chain. We’ll keep you updated
Just to add this isn’t exclusive to mondo. I used to get this with First Direct when using applePay - except it never refunded and despite 4 months they never figured it out and send you back to the retailer to sort!
Used to hate when this happened when I worked in retail! Always a nightmare trying to pursuade a customer to reprocess the payment even though the money had gone from their account, while I’m there knowing full well when the retailer doesn’t pull the money it will drop back to their account!!
Most retailers do have processes to deal with this usually a specialist team at head offices that can reverse transactions there and then but such processes are generally unknown about!
This happened to me buying petrol and it was kinda frustrating having my balance messed up for 10 days. Didn’t realise they can do put the balance back manually, can you do this buy showing the declined receipt?
