Why are my donors seeing multiple charges on their accounts?

Jeana Hollingsworth · July 2007

Sometimes when donors make donations, their initial attempts to process the transaction fail and they receive an error message saying to check their information and try again. They double-check their entered information, try to process the transaction again and on this attempt it succeeds. However, when they look at their Credit Card or Bank Statement, they see 2 transactions, as if the first transaction had gone through. Why does this happen and what can be done about it?

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This happens because of the way payment processing is handled through Convio and your Payment Processor Network.

Payment Processors are the companies that handle processing Credit Card Transactions and transferring the funds to your Merchant Account. Typical Payment Processors on Convio-powered sites are PayPal (formerly VeriSign), eFunds (formerly ClearCommerce), and IATS.

All Payment Processor accounts used with Convio are set up to include Fraud Protection Services, which cause all transactions to take place in a 2-step process:

1) Authorization – places a hold on the card holder’s open-to-buy limit, lowering the card holder’s limit by the amount of the transaction. It does not transfer funds.

An Authorization may be sent back with 2 states: Approved or Declined. If the account number is bad, or if there are insufficient funds, the Authorization is declined (and there is no hold placed on the funds). If the account number is good and there are sufficient funds to cover the transaction, the Authorization is approved but may contain an error code.

(Note: this is a simplification of the process; some banks may institute additional rules for approvals or declines)

2) Response - respond appropriately based off the bank's reply to the Authorization:

A. If the Authorization is completely approved, a Delayed Capture transaction is performed after an Authorization to capture the original Authorization amount. A Delayed Capture transaction is what handles transferring the funds from the card's issuing bank to your Merchant Account. It means that the funds are scheduled for settlement during the next settlement period (typically around midnight that same night, or midnight the next night). The name "Delayed Capture" comes from the fact that this is not an immediate transfer of funds, but is instead delayed until the next settlement batch.

B. If the Authorization is approved with an error code (such as CVV or Address Verification mismatch), a Void Transaction is placed, which prevents a transaction from being settled but does not release the Authorization (hold on funds) on the cardholder’s account.

The reason the hold on the funds is not released is because you cannot remove a hold on funds through the processing networks—you must contact the card issuing bank to lift a hold early.

The most common error codes that are returned with an Approved Authorization are a mismatch on the CVV code or an Address Verification Mismatch. Essentially, the bank is saying "Yes, that's a valid account and there are enough funds to cover that charge, however, you don't have the correct CVV code or Billing Address. What do you want us to do with this transaction?"

Since a mismatch on the CVV code and Address are common indicators of a fraudulent transaction, the answer to handling those is to not complete the transaction. The Void Transaction handles telling the bank "Do not send us that money, as this is possibly a fraudulent transaction."

It is up to the banks for how to handle showing the hold on the funds to their customers. Some banks show these on statements as a transaction, some may append wording such as "Pending" to that to indicate that this is not a completed transaction. Some simply deduct the amount from the Available Balance, and some have a special section for "Holds" or "Locks".

Convio never makes multiple attempts to process a single transaction, so if a customer sees 3 transactions on their statement, it is because they clicked on the "Process Payment" button 3 times (note that Convio does implement security such that double-clicking on that button will not submit the transaction twice).

If a customer does make multiple attempts to process a payment and these result in multiple holds being placed on their account, they have a couple of options to deal with that:

1) Wait for the bank to release the hold. This typically happens within 1 week of the attempted transaction. The length of time that the hold is in place may vary from bank to bank and card to card however; American Express cards may show a hold for 14-21 days before it automatically drops off.

2) Contact the card-issuing bank directly and request that they release the hold on those funds. This would best be done 1-2 business days after the attempted transaction, since at that point a successful transaction should have settled. The bank should be able to see X number of transactions with 1 that has settled and release the hold on the failed transactions.

A common follow up question in these situations is "Why can't Convio work off of the error message that is returned to help the user know what went wrong?"

The answer is that we do work off of the error codes as much as possible. Occasionally banks and payment processors change or add error codes, and when this happens Convio is updated to handle them. The error messages that are displayed to the user are contained within each site's Message Catalog. Changing these typically requires the assistance of Convio, so if you have an update that you would like made to your error messages, contact Convio with the details of the current error message that people are seeing (cut and paste or a screenshot), when they have seen it (donor's name, date/time of the attempt, and amount of the transaction), and the text you would like the message to display instead.

Why are my donors seeing multiple charges on their accounts?

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