I regularly do my grocery shopping online, when taking payment they (all major supermarkets I believe, and maybe many other online retailers too) “pre-authorise” your card with a £1 charge to verify it exists and has funds available. After you receive your shopping they refund that and charge you the actual amount.
In the Mondo app I still see the original £1 charge (almost a week ago), followed by the actual transaction a couple of days later. When I used to use my old fashioned bank’s debit card for this the £1 would only appear in “pending transactions” and would disappear on the day the real transaction was made
So why am I still seeing it a week later in Mondo? Is this an actual bug in which I’ll be losing £1 every time I shop online? Or is it just a case of me needing to wait longer for it to be refunded? If the latter then that’s fine, it’s only £1 so don’t mind if it simply needs more time. Just seeking clarification on how these charges are handled by Mondo/the app and if it’s a bug or not.
Yes I meant to add that actually… What I hope to see is the £1 removed from the transaction list and of course add £1 back to my remaining balance.
What I don’t want to see is 3 total transactions in the list for the merchant: the initial £1 charge, the actual charge for shopping, then finally a £1 refund. Otherwise my history is going to look rather cluttered with meaningless sums of money.
Those charges will be automatically removed by the merchant within 10 working days so if you hold tight, it’ll disappear. If it’s for a larger amount, you can always drop us a message through in-app support and we can manually clear it before the 10-day limit
Forgot to update this. Can confirm the £1 was refunded to me on the 10th day
The minor annoyance is that it was another separate transaction for £1. Myself and RossA alluded to this earlier in the topic saying we’d rather see the original £1 transaction removed, which is how the old banks currently handle this, and personally I feel is the best way since it’s what users will probably expect, others may disagree though.
It’s not a huge deal but it’s just a little UX thing I think would improve this aspect of online shopping using Mondo cards. It has two benefits:
Less clutter in the transaction history
Visit count would be accurate (it currently says I have three visits because of these separated transactions, should just be one)
I imagine the logic to this would be fairly simple in your code, of course there’s probably more to it than this but essentially…
if (refunded transaction value == original transaction value from 10 days ago) {
// remove original transaction and increment balance by value
}
And of course you wouldn’t want to do that for legitimate refunds, just those where the value is £1 (Ocado, Tesco, Sainsburys and many others) or 1p (Asda apparently) for the purposes of a pre-auth. So that may complicate the code a bit. Anyway, not high priority but something to consider perhaps?
What is the difference between pre-auth and Active card check?
I just registered card with 2 companies and got the following:
ITunes did pre-auth with a small amount
PayPal is just a message saying ‘Active card check’ which I can clear
From what I understand, an active card check is just a £0 pre-auth. Both are meant to check whether the card is active and the pre-auth check whether you have funds in your account.
I find it all of this very odd that there isn’t a better way to do this without actually showing that they’re trying to take money.
If I’m registering a card for a future transaction then doing a pre-auth with an amount doesn’t guarantee that I will have money in the future. In this scenario the pre-auth with 0 make more sense.
I know some web sites use the amount to authenticate you - i.e. Come back in few days and type amount from statement back into the site. Again I’m not sure whether this is any safer than sending an SMS code (as per Monzo card activation)
I guess the web sites (each company) have their reasons!!!