Around 13 days back I chanced upon the Blue Frog music store and decided to purchase some albums. While attempting to check-out and pay by a Visa card the payment gateway (CC Avenue) threw an odd error of Error Code: 94 Error Description: Amount Invalid. Just for the heck of it I changed browsers (Chromium -> Google Chrome -> Firefox -> Opera on a stock Fedora 14 installation) and saw the same result.

I wrote in to the contact address, which is the sales@ address/alias.

I was advised to try a Mastercard as "Mastercard sometimes works better than Visa cards" (exact quote). Tried that. Same result. Tried, just for kicks, the same browser hoop - same result. And thereafter informed the contact about being unable to complete the transaction. All this continued for around a week or so by the time I had more or less decided to give up.

The point of this post is that how often do online retailers/shops lose customers because their payment gateways end up causing transaction grief ? And, how prepared are they to be able to provide alternative means of payment ? In this case I was offered the option of an electronic transfer to enable the transaction completion. However, an electronic transfer wouldn't provide me with a system generated receipt. Which is the natural end result of a check-out during a purchase.

So, how do the retailers deal with these situations ?