[pja]

My experience ordering a Nexus 4 was a bit of a farce: Google managed to trigger the anti-fraud block on both of my credit cards, each with different UK banks. It looks like they put through a small value transaction (£1) first to test whether the card works & only then put through the full purchase transaction.

Why they can't just put the transaction through in the first place & just report back if it fails I've no idea, but thanks to Google I had to phone up the respective banks to get the cards unblocked. Not the best use of anyone's time...

[ig1]

(entirely speculative)

They may be doing it precisely for that purpose.

Risk systems generally working on scoring mechanism, if the £1 transaction was enough to push you over the threshold then your cards may well be on the borderline for "this card might be stolen".

Google might be using it to test if the card is a borderline "stolen card" case because they want to be extra cautious about who they ship phones to.

[pja]

Yeah, that would make a twisted kind of sense.

I never have this kind of trouble with other vendors though.

[alvarosm]

Read my reply to see how they're also extra-cautious about selling $1 apps...

[alvarosm]

That's another of the many virtues of Google Checkout / Wallet... it blocks a ton of transactions based on some dubious anti-fraud checks. I guess regular sellers just move on to a better payment processor but those of us who sell on Google Play are stuck with this joke of a payment processor. Also, Google gets a 30% cut just for exposure at the store and the poor payment processing they do, I mean, support is beyond a joke, it's simply non-existent. Just like when I ordered the Nexus 4 and got in contact to complain about the delays, talking to the "support" staff (when you manage to get an actual human being to reply at all) is like talking to a brick wall with some FAQs stuck to it in post-it notes. I once sent a screenshot to a couple of reporters to show them just how many transactions were automatically cancelled as a side note -we were talking about other Google Play issues- and I guess they didn't even bother to look into the cancelled transactions issues because it looked unreal. I think it got a bit better over time, it's probably 10% cancelled now, but it used to be up to 50% in particularly bad days and maybe 20% average. A total joke.

[pja]

Nope, it's not Wallet doing the blocking (at least not in my case): it was the banks which had issued the credit cards in question.

I've had it happen before, but that was when I'd bought a small pile of cheap Android Apps & then gone to buy something expensive elsewhere (not via Google Wallet) and those transactions triggered the fraud checks, not entirely unreasonably even if it was a little annoying at the time.

Having my cards blocked because Google is issuing fake test transactions for no good reason whatsoever that I can see is somewhat more annoying however!

[alvarosm]

In the cases I was talking about, it was Google. They don't even attempt to charge the cards until a certain period of time (1 hour or so? more than the 15-minute refund period anyway) has passed, so the cancellations happen before any attempt to charge the card, so it's Google, not the banks.

[pja]

Sure: just to clarify, I was only talking about my specific transaction there.

Clearly, Google can and will manage to make a craptacular mess of handling payments for other people in whatever ingenious ways they can come up with!

[taligent]

The small value transaction is called a pre-auth and yes it is designed to test whether the card works. It's not a big deal in most countries since it just disappears automatically. But IIRC in the UK it doesn't. Google probably figures they can use the same rules in every country. Pretty dumb move.

The reason stores do it this way is because of legal reasons. They can't bill your credit card until it is shipped but yet need to know you have the money before building it.

[pja]

They're still issuing a pre-auth for the whole amount even after the small-value one, so what's the point? They could just pre-auth the full value in the first place!

They can't legally take payment until they actually ship regardless so they're going to have to put the transaction through the card at a later date whatever they do initially.