The money was withdrawn but the application did not reach me

[cyrop]

Hello, I bought the mac version of the affinity photo from your site, money was taken from my account, but the application did not reach me. Even though my money has been withdrawn, the application is not visible.

[Adam]

Hello @cyrop,

Apologies you are having trouble. 

I've sent you an email regarding this for further discussion.

Thanks for your time,

Adam

[cyrop]

6 minutes ago, Adam said:

Hello @cyrop,

Apologies you are having trouble. 

I've sent you an email regarding this for further discussion.

Thanks for your time,

Adam

hi adam,

email did not reach me

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, cyrop said:

email did not reach me

Have you checked your Spam folder?

[Adam]

On 11/24/2021 at 11:22 AM, cyrop said:

hi adam,

email did not reach me

Sorry to hear that. It looks like you've managed to email us in the meantime; did you receive those responses?

Adam 🙂

[Alex Hide]

Hey! Just purchased the Photo and have the same issue, unfortunately. Please contact me via e-mail to solve it.

[cyrop]

1 hour ago, Alex Hide said:

Hey! Just purchased the Photo and have the same issue, unfortunately. Please contact me via e-mail to solve it.

my money still has not come back officially my money was stolen no one is helping.bank says payment done. Affinity photo, says payment declined.where is my money if the money is not in both? no customer satisfaction.They provide a terrible service.I lost my money because of the mistake on their website.

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, cyrop said:

my money still has not come back officially my money was stolen no one is helping.bank says payment done. Affinity photo, says payment declined.where is my money if the money is not in both? no customer satisfaction.They provide a terrible service.I lost my money because of the mistake on their website.

Have you received the emails from the Serif team, as @Adam inquired on Friday?

Have you checked your Spam folder, as I suggested?

[cyrop]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Have you received the emails from the Serif team, as @Adam inquired on Friday?

Have you checked your Spam folder, as I suggested?

I didn't get my money, what does it matter if I'm the answer?

[cyrop]

If they had good intentions, they should have admitted their mistakes and given the application to me. I am being punished for their own mistakes. You are not sincere.

[Alex Hide]

8 minutes ago, cyrop said:

If they had good intentions, they should have admitted their mistakes and given the application to me. I am being punished for their own mistakes. You are not sincere.

Hopefully the support will contact us and we'll get our app soon

[Patrick Connor]

@Alex Hide

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums  

2 minutes ago, Alex Hide said:

Hopefully the support will contact us

You need to email AffinityOrders@serif.com with your payment details (do not post here) and they will look them up on the payment system

[Patrick Connor]

20 hours ago, cyrop said:

If they had good intentions, they should have admitted their mistakes and given the application to me. I am being punished for their own mistakes. You are not sincere.

@cyrop

We have emailed you the proof that we never received the money, due to a rejection of the CCV (perhaps mistyped)

Your bank/credit card should have returned the money to you by now. If they have not, then forward them the screenshot in our email and ask when it will be returned. We cannot do this on your behalf, sorry.

[Alex Hide]

1 minute ago, Patrick Connor said:

You need to email AffinityOrders@serif.com with your payment details (do not post here) and they will look them up on the payment system

Oh, thank you! Will do now.

[User_783649]

2 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

due to a rejection of the CCV (perhaps mistyped)

No, Patrick. Unfortunately.

So many people (including myself) couldn't mistype CVV code all at once.

There is definitely a fault/mistake/misconfiguration in your payment/order processing system. For some reason your system declines some of the orders.

It might be your payment gate misconfiguration, various regional restrictions, some kind of preventive anti-fraud system being set up too sensitive. 

Please check your payment system. Many people weren't able to purchase your software on this and previous week.

I personally got the same error as some of the people in this and other topics here on forums.

I was unable to finish the purchase due to mistake on Affinity Store website. All card details were 100% correct and 3D Secure was completed successfully (SMS code was entered). Error appeared in the very end after all bank popups gone on the page of Affinity Store. So it's not my bank error.

My money are still reserved (put on hold) from 24th November.

My card and bank are all fine as on the same week I purchased lots of different software licenses and paid for domains and hosting.

[walt.farrell]

17 hours ago, Alex M said:

No, Patrick. Unfortunately

Patrick was talking to user cyrop, and the info he provided seems (to me) to have been specific to cyrop's purchase attempt.

I think you should continue your case via email, as Patrick suggested, to avoid potential confusion here.

[User_783649]

@walt.farrell Unfortunately, this problem is not specific to this particular user. It's an issue that faced some of the people (including myself).

I already see the repeating patterns in this topic and some of the others where people experience the same problem, and get the exact same error messages.

I already had 10 emails back and forth with Affinity support. At some point when I requested additional information about payment they just stopped responding to me.

With all respect, there's no any potential confusion. But there's definitely lack of attention to payment/order processing system in Affinity Store.

[Ali]

And another (to corroborate your point):

 

[Adam]

Hello all,

I've made an FAQ relating to the discussion on this thread here, and have pasted below for your convenience.

Why is my order failing to process?

Payment failures/declines are as a result of one of many factors. We are actively investigating the reason for credit card failures with Braintree (the payment processor we use), but there is nothing specific we are able to pin this on, currently.

When a customer places an order with us via the Affinity Store, and they choose to pay by credit/debit card, only a small amount of information is provided to us; this is intentional for GDPR and General Data Protection purposes. We process payments and orders based on this information, and Braintree either authorises or rejects the payment using this information, as well as a multitude of additional factors. Unfortunately we have no control over this.

The overall processing failure rate seems to be at approximately 5%, but note that this changes throughout the year for a variety of reasons, and this number does not give an indication as to the differences between currency, location, risk-rate etc. - whilst we can't provide this information specifically, please know that this data swings wildly in many directions.

The back-end procedure of customers placing orders can be rather involved, and so cannot always be successful. We only ask for a customer's name, email address and country of residence, and we specifically don't ask for their billing address; we think this may be part of the reason certain orders fail, but we cannot be 100% sure.

In any case please accept our apologies for the trouble you are experiencing; this is certainly something we are trying to constantly improve.

What can I do to fix this?

If this happens to you, might I suggest you try updating your web browser to the latest version, if not already? You could also try using a different web browser or another computer, if you have access.

We accept PayPal, and so this can be used for payment if you have an account.

There are restrictions on the number of orders that can be placed within any 24 hour period; If you happen to have placed two orders on the website within 24 hours, and wish to place another within that time, you may receive an error as a result of this. The Affinity Store will allow you to add several items to your basket for one payment/transaction, and we'd always recommend this for future orders.

A number of our customers have mentioned that their use of popular browser plugins may affect their ability to place an order on the Affinity website, and that temporarily disabling them fixed the issue.

What will happen to the money that has left my account?

Don't worry about the funds that have seemingly left your bank account/credit card; these funds have only been reserved for payment by your bank and have not been collected by Affinity. Depending on your bank/credit card company, the funds will drop from their reserved state within a maximum of 28 days (usually much sooner). If you have any queries relating to this, please contact your financial institution; they should be able to give you more specific information.

If you still have questions or concerns, please send an email to affinity@serif.com

Adam

[Patrick Connor]

17 hours ago, Alex M said:

So many people (including myself) couldn't mistype CVV code all at once.

We have taken hundreds of thousands of pounds during this sale, surely you can conceive that a very small percentage of those will have this standard problem, all at the same apparent time. Our sales are ridiculously busy and so this looks like a pattern of failure right now, but it is statistically no worse than normal given the high current level of sales. I appreciate it may not feel like that for anyone affected, but as you can imagine when there is any technical blockage to people giving us money we sort it immediately as we like the income. This slow refunding is completely out of our hands, as we never got the funds, but we appreciate you trying to purchase.

I hope that all the participants in this thread do eventually come back and confirm that their banks have refunded them, as has always been the case in these situations before. It is a shame when this has come up in the past how few forum members who experience this do return to confirm that it was all sorted as expected. If they did it would give you more confidence in our replies.

[User_783649]

Thank you very much @Patrick Connor for a very detailed and explanative response.

Btw, I never stated anywhere that money leaved my bank account. In fact I do see them just being put on hold not withdrawn. So technically they're still in my bank just being marked as "reserved". No problems here. I believe it's a normal practice to reserve certain amount before processing the payment. So, the payment gate can make sure there's enough money before processing further.

The only thing that worries me is that your payment gate may reject some countries and/or banks/cards due to various (and not obvious) reasons. Sanctions, some preventive anti-fraud policies, etc. I already met 3 or 4 people who are also from Russia (just like me and one of them using the same bank institution as I) here on forums who were also unable to complete their purchase on this and last week. Obviously, it is out of your control I believe. Probably, it is Braintree declining some transactions for some reason.

I fully understand that some kind of global misconfiguration will result in significant drop of sales and number of orders being placed in your system. So it is not the case, obviously. Just a tiny issue with some of us.

In my recent conversation with Adam (from your team) I was told that Russia is one of the toughest countries to deal with and there is a significantly larger failure rate with payments/orders.

I really love Affinity software, Patrick. Just want to find the way to purchase another 3 licenses, this time for myself personally.

So sad, that this sweet Black Friday deal is almost over and I'm afraid if I'll try to pay again, it will fail again. Unfortunately, I'm not that rich to experiment with all cards I have placing orders again and again trying to guess will it work this time or not.

Thank you once again for your time commenting on this.

Edited December 1, 2021 by Alex M

[cyrop]

2 hours ago, Alex M said:

Thank you very much @Patrick Connor for a very detailed and explanative response.

Btw, I never stated anywhere that money leaved my bank account. In fact I do see them just being put on hold not withdrawn. So technically they're still in my bank just being marked as "reserved". No problems here. I believe it's a normal practice to reserve certain amount before processing the payment. So, the payment gate can make sure there's enough money before processing further.

The only thing that worries me is that your payment gate may reject some countries and/or banks/cards due to various (and not obvious) reasons. Sanctions, some preventive anti-fraud policies, etc. I already met 3 or 4 people who are also from Russia (just like me and one of them using the same bank institution as I) here on forums who were also unable to complete their purchase on this and last week. Obviously, it is out of your control I believe. Probably, it is Braintree declining some transactions for some reason.

I fully understand that some kind of global misconfiguration will result in significant drop of sales and number of orders being placed in your system. So it is not the case, obviously. Just a tiny issue with some of us.

In my recent conversation with Adam (from your team) I was told that Russia is one of the toughest countries to deal with and there is a significantly larger failure rate with payments/orders.

I really love Affinity software, Patrick. Just want to find the way to purchase another 3 licenses, this time for myself personally.

So sad, that this sweet Black Friday deal is almost over and I'm afraid if I'll try to pay again, it will fail again. Unfortunately, I'm not that rich to experiment with all cards I have placing orders again and again trying to guess will it work this time or not.

Thank you once again for your time commenting on this.

Thank you Alex. 

There is a problem and it is not accepted.

 

 

 

[User_783649]

Well, turns out it is Braintree, Affinity store payment processor, is configured too "tight" so it triggers some internal anti-fraud blocks and security checks when processing certain payments.

In this official article from Braintree website, it's clear for me: there are such settings as AVS and CVV rules and they can be adjusted so more transactions will be considered as valid and correct and not rejected anymore.

https://developer.paypal.com/braintree/articles/guides/fraud-tools/basic/avs-cvv-rules

I already submitted this and some other information to the team. Hopefully, we'll see some improvements on this.

Added (3 Dec 2021):

As Adam mentioned above, "when a customer places an order with us via the Affinity Store, and they choose to pay by credit/debit card, only a small amount of information is provided to us; this is intentional for GDPR and General Data Protection purposes."

I believe in this case AVS rules are better be off completely, as we, customers, don't provide any postal codes or address lines. And CVV rules better be set to its minimum settings – so the rejection will only occur when CVV doesn't match (when provided).

In my case, payment was rejected by Braintree's triggered CVV rejection rule. And on the screenshot, I was provided by Adam, I can see "Gateway rejected: CVV".

https://developer.paypal.com/braintree/docs/reference/general/processor-responses/avs-cvv-responses

On this page we can learn what exactly happened with each transaction by knowing exact response code of why it failed.

Maybe it will help you guys to determine if there's a repeating behavior for all of us who was unable to complete the purchase.

Edited December 4, 2021 by Alex M

[User_783649]

Exactly 9 days since the day of purchase attempt, hold was cancelled just as expected (accordingly to my bank rules). So money are fully back now and available on my account.

To anyone who's concerning about where did their funds go: please don't worry! Hold is just technical procedure of reserving the amount for a certain period of time. This maximum period is determined by each bank individually. At some point this hold will be just cancelled in case of failed transaction and the full amount will appear on your account just like it was always here.

[User_783649]

Interesting to know, if any changes in gateway settings were made by Serif team in their Braintree account?

It's really tempting to try make a purchase once again since Black Friday deal is still available.

Just want to be sure that my card won't be rejected again. Could anyone from the Serif store team actually comment on this for us?

Thanks in advance.