Why was my transaction declined?

There are many reasons a card could be declined.  If a card has declined many times, even after Benji Pays has disabled the profile due to declines, it's possible that the card could become blocked on your merchant account by your gateway provider (Moneris, Elavon etc.).  Please see full article below for more details.

Does Benji Pays decline my transactions?

No Benji Pays does not make any decisions on whether a transaction should be declined.

Approvals are provided by the card holders issuing bank.

When you process a payment in Benji Pays, the transaction is sent to your payment gateway, which then sends it to the payment network and on to the card holder bank for approval.

If declined, that decline reason is sent back to Benji Pays and displayed in the transaction results.  The decline reason is provided by the issuing bank and generally won't be very detailed.  They do this to reduce potential fraud cases.

Sometimes the decline reason is simply "DECLINED". This generally means the card is over its limit, or some other generic reason for a decline.  The only way to find out more is to have the card holder call their bank. Unfortunately, Benji Pays has no way of knowing why the card was declined. 

How do I find the reason for the declined transaction?

To view the details of the transactions, find the transaction on your home page, or on the Daily Transaction Results or Transaction Reporting pages (found under the Transactions menu).  You can also navigate to the customer's page and view their transactions there. 

Your transactions will look like this, click the result pill or the eye icon as shown in the image below.

You will see a result that looks similar to the image below.  The decline reason sent from the bank will be shown in a few places - shown in red rectangles below.

You will also see the Response Code shown, in this case it's '086'.  The response codes are different for each payment gateway.  In this case the transaction was processed via Moneris, so if we google "Moneris response code 086" the first result is the Moneris Response Code page . If we look for '086' on that page we see the following description:

This is the reason for the decline. In this case, we are charging more than is available or allowed on the provided card. It's best to have your customer call their bank for details as Benji Pays has no further details than what has been provided from your payment gateway.

How do I find a list of response codes for each Payment Gateway?

Here is a list of links for you, however also googling the gateway name with the response code will generally work.

Moneris response codes

Elavon response codes

Bambora response codes

Global Payments response codes

Helcim decline information

My customer spoke with their bank and everything is fine with the account. Why is the charge declining?

This may be due to card brand rules regarding the number of times a merchant can retry a card that is declining before that card is blocked for the merchant for a period of time.

The card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express etc.) all have their own rules as to how many subsequent declines a merchant can have for any given card before that merchant should be blocked from using that card again for a period of time. This is to prevent fraud.

Each payment gateway enforces these rules a little differently, but in general, if you have 10 or more subsequent declines in a 30 day period, the card will be blocked for your merchant account until 30 days have passed with no declines.

You may also be blocked if you have too many retries in a single day, this could be a low number, for instance 4 times in a few minutes may raise a block.  

Benji Pays does not control these blocks and can not unblock your merchant account.  You can contact your merchant account provider (Moneris, Elavon etc.) and ask them to help, but they may not be able to remove the block.

Benji Pays automatically disables payment profiles after you reach 8 subsequent declines.

You may still attempt that card, however note that you may cause it to be blocked.  

If you are getting many subsequent blocks, ask your customer for a new card, or wait a few days before retrying before re-enabling the card for auto processing.

Here are some examples of the difference between a Moneris transaction declined by the card holders bank, vs one declined by Moneris Velocity Control Fraud Protection.  You may see similar differences in these transactions in other gateways.

In Benji Pays

In the Moneris Gateway