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Argos Credit Card Fiasco

A heads up for anyone thinking of buying something from Argos by credit card.

Yesterday my wife went to pay using her credit card and was declined twice by Argos. She then paid for the item using her Switch card.

Today she phoned her bank to find out why her card had been declined and was told that they had given authorisation both times and the payments had gone through. Net result my wife has paid for the same thing three times.

So she phoned Argos to find out what was going on. They said it was a known problem. When asked why the branch had not informed her of this and taken payment three times, it was suggested that maybe the branch was unaware of the problem. Sounds like either incompetence at head office or BS to me.

The up shot is her account is £60 pounds shorter than it should be and according to her bank and Argos it will take up to a month to sort out. She will need to query the payment with her bank once she gets her statement.

While in this case it will not cause us any hardship it might very well have. What if because of this we incurred interest payments on the credit card? Or if using a debit card and being unaware of the situation went into overdraft over the next month, thinking we had the funds to cover the payment. Would Argos pay for our bank charges, the lose would have been because of their payment system.

As far as I know Argos has not made their customers aware of this problem, in fact in their own words they have said that their branches do not know about this. I wonder how many other people have been affected by this. INCREDIBLE. :eek:
 
Ive had a similar story at Argos, but using my debit card rather than CC, in fact my card was debited twice, then eventually found out the item I was after was out of stock aswell, so why take payment anyway.

So if anyone is going shopping via Argos, check how many times your paying, then check again
 
I can accept there will be issues with the card sales systems from time to time, but to take a month to sort them out is disgraceful.

I don't shop with Argos very oftem (most things I might buy from them are cheaper online), but I'll definitely be keeing an eye out for this next time I do.

Andy
 
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I can accept there will be issues with the card sales systems from time to time, but to take a month to sort them out is disgraceful.

Absolutely, if that happens to me, and they tell me it will take a month to refund my money, then I'd ask my bank to perform a chargback, and argos would get hit by the bank's admin fee.
 
I use their store card then pay promptly when I get the account so as not to incur any charges.
 
Why couldn't Argos issue credit-card refunds immediately?? :eek:

Especially as they appear to have admitted their mistake!
 
I had a similar occurence a few years ago with Serif.
Having been a longstanding customer from the first version of Page Plus and each successive upgrade, I got an email offer from them to buy the newest PP9. Deciding to take advantage of the offer I went through the online order process and got a msg stating that my card had been refused. Thinking that I must have mistyped an entry I tried again with the same result.

There was no valid reason why my card should have been refused so I sent an email to my card provider (EGG). The following morning I got a reply explaining that my card was now OK again and the reason for the refusal was that I had overused my card for that day and pointing out that my account was limited to a maximum of TEN transactions in any ONE day but was reset at midnight.

Being only a very occasional card user I phoned the bank for more details as I now feared someone had been using my details without my knowledge.
I asked for my card usage to be suspended until the cause was investigated but instead the bank cancelled the card and sent me out a new one with a new card number.

The cost of my page plus upgrade was £13 and for some reason Serif Software's bank had taken 13 x £1 which had locked my account. Even after the card being cancelled, the cost of the software eventually found it's way onto my new account.

Both EGG and SERIF said Sorry very disinterestedly so I have never used either of them since.

I was quite disturbed at the time and now if I wish to buy an online offer, I normally phone through if possible to make sure that I don't get caught out again.
 
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Dream

I dream of buying somthing using my bank cards and not being debited at all. But for some reason this never happens. I wonder why? :mad:
 
simple reason... they want you money...
 
IIRC PC World once double charged my debit card (large security guard came over to the checkout when I complained about it, as if it was my fault - which was nice), they then refunded me twice later on. I decided the odds of them coming after me for an extra £200 were rather high so I returned their mistaken cheque. :hrmph:
 
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Why couldn't Argos issue credit-card refunds immediately?? :eek:

Especially as they appear to have admitted their mistake!

Does anybody know if it is possible for credit card refunds to be made over the phone?

We were lead to believe that it could not. :confused:
 
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