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Thanks for the commercial perspective.

Your credit card processing company aren't very helpful, though. I wonder how many sales you lost through them, and which credit cards they decline. Mine is a Visa card issued from a New Zealand bank. As I said, I rarely have any trouble purchasing anything with it.


The unfortunate reality about using a card processor is that cards do indeed get declined all the time. We use a different processor for Strip Kittens and have it set up so we get an e-mail every time a card is declined. Some days we get 10 or more of decline e-mails, but it averages about 3 per day.

Declines happen for many reasons; the card processors call it "scrubbing" and basically that means they decline any card that may appear in any way to be fraudulent, stolen, have problems in some way, etc. It may be that in the past your card number was used by someone else (before you were assigned that number) and that person had troubles with it. It's hard to say. I notice also that you're in Japan, and since your card is from New Zealand and your address is Japan, the scrubbing system may have issues with that (some countries are scrubbed harder than others do to higher rates of fraud).

The sad fact is that we lose several sales every day due to scrubbing but if it weren't for that our "chargeback" rates (when someone claims they didn't buy something with a credit card online, and we eat the cost) would skyrocket, and we wouldn't be able to accept credit cards at all. There are so many people out there making fraudulent purchases online that it would really blow your mind. Fortunately though, compared to actual sales, declines don't really amount to much.

In any event, I'm sorry you weren't able to get your card to work and I'm concerned with the fact that you say RegNow wasn't very helpful. I'll look into that. As an alternative we do accept money orders or cashiers checks sent to our PO box via snail mail if you're interested in that. Let me know by PM if you want to go that route, and I'll get you set up.

Thanks again.