Why was my credit card declined?

;['Why was a charge declined?

Declines can happen for a variety of reasons. When the payment processor (e.g. Stripe) submits a charge to a cardholder's bank, they have automated systems that determine whether or not to accept the charge. These systems take various signals into account, such as the cardholder's spending habits, account balance, and card information like the expiration date and CVV/CVC security number.

Since these signals are constantly changing, a previously successful card might be declined in the future. Even if all of the card information is correct (like the card number itself or the CVC security code), and the cardholder previously had a successful payment, a future charge can still be declined by a bank’s overzealous fraud systems.

If all of the card information seems correct (card number, CVC code, and billing zip code) and if they have tried multiple times unsuccessfully, it is best to have the cardholder contact their bank, inquire for more information on the decline, and ask for future charges to be accepted.

It is the cardholder's bank that is declining the charge and sending the error so they alone know why it was declined and how to correct it so the cardholder can successfully checkout.

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A payment failed and the reason was “Your card does not support this type of purchase.” What does that mean?

There are a few different reasons that you might get this response when a payment fails:

• Some debit cards require a PIN to be entered. If the cardholder is trying to use one of these cards, they'll need to use another card to make the purchase.
• Some cards have restrictions on cross-border usage. If the card was issued in a country (the 'origin' field when you view the details of the payment) other than where your business is located, this might be the problem. In this case, please have the cardholder contact their bank to see if they have this restriction.
• Some cards (often corporate cards or FSA cards) can only be used for certain business categories, like travel or healthcare.

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A payment failed and the reason was “Your card is not supported.” What does that mean? Which cards and payment types can I accept with Stripe?

With Stripe, you can charge almost any kind of credit or debit card:

• U.S. businesses can accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB, Discover, and Diners Club.
• Australian, Canadian, European, and Japanese businesses can accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

You can also accept gift and prepaid cards that are one of the above types. If the cardholder is getting a "Your card is not supported." error message then this means that they are trying to use a card that isn't supported by the payment processor (e.g. Stripe) for the country where your store is located. If this happens then the cardholder should try using a different brand of card that would be supported for that merchant's country.

Common error seen here is a Canada-based store using Stripe but the cardholder gets a "card not supported" error message when trying to use a Discover card because Stripe currently doesn't support Discover cards in Canada.

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A payment failed and the reason was “Your card has insufficient funds.” What does that mean?

There are a few different reasons that you might get this response when a payment fails:

• The most common reason is just what the error message states. The cardholder's bank is saying that they don't have enough funds in their account to cover the costs of the purchase.
• Another reason is sometimes cardholders' banks don't properly assess the risk of currency conversion of purchases so instead of being wrong on knowing if there are enough funds, if they see that the purchase is in a different currency used than the primary card holder's bank account then they'll decline the charge as insufficient funds just so currency conversion or the currency conversion fee doesn't overdraw the account. This can happen even when there are plenty of funds in the account and is just because of the bank’s overzealous fraud system. If a cardholder sees this error message, they should contact their bank, inquire for more information, and ask for future charges to be accepted.

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Why are payments being declined as "the zip code you supplied failed validation"?

• See our help doc on this error here.

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Every payment gateway processor uses different terminology for errors the cardholder could receive on your checkout page. Most of these errors will be the same (Invalid Credit Card Number, Card Expired, etc) but there will be some that you do not recognize. Find the payment gateway you use and go to the section to learn about the basic errors that might come up. 

1. Stripe Errors

When a cardholder receives any of these errors they are coming directly from Stripe and communication with the cardholder's bank.