Daily Home Renovation Tips

As that article outlined, my experience was arguably not the fault of the 3V Visa product but possibly the retailer who failed until several days later to inform me that my on-line purchase had in fact not been successful but had become rejected.

So, I waited a couple of weeks and tried again.

However, as before with only $20 to use I was thinking what I could purchase. Home Depot does not offer a Home Depot Gift Card for less than $20 so I couldn’t simply go back to that well again with a smaller costing gift card.

Then after seeing all those commercials during the early stages of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics on TV for a certain brand  of coffee in Canada, I had an idea. My wife still had her Tim Horton’s gift card she received from one of our kids at Christmas. I checked and it had all of $1.97 left.

So, I thought to myself, why not be the ‘nice guy’, earn some brownie points and simply use the $20 3V Visa pre-paid voucher I had been given to add $20 onto her Tim’s card?

Sounds simple enough, right?

Ha.

Although to Tim Horton’s credit, at least they told me right away that my attempt was not successful.

The first time I tried to use the 3V Visa pre-paid voucher to add $20 to my wife’s Tim Card, I received a message saying that I had entered an inaccurate security code. You know how on the back or front of your credit card there is a 3 or 4 digit number in addition to the actual credit card number itself? This is referred to by some as a Security Code.

I found this weird because I thought I had entered it accurately, but to err is human.

So, all I had to do was to re-enter the 3 digit Security Code which is part of the 3V Visa pre-paid voucher as all of the other details were still displayed on the screen. Once I did this I was again rejected (gee, good thing I don’t take rejection too personally). However, this time the error message displayed was that there was insufficient balance remaining available on the 3V Visa voucher.

Strange. How could there be ‘insufficient balance’ when the first attempt was rejected by Tim’s on-line system because of an invalid Security Code (which means that the transaction was rejected by VISA)

You see, what I didnt’ know and only found out a little later was that the first transaction actually was successful and authorized on Visa’s end. In fact it still displayed as an authorized transaction with an authorization number within my view of my 3V Visa account for several days until it was manually removed by VISA’s customer support as part of their attempt to resolve this issue. However, it didappear as an incomplete transaction (unconfirmed by the retailer, in this case Tim Horton’s). Interesting how the retailer’s system told me that the Security Code was not valid for the voucher number yet the 3V Visa system accepted and authorized it just fine and dan-dy.

Now, because on the 3V Visa side of the transaction the first attempt was authorized there was $0 left in my 3V Visa voucher. Therefore, the Tim Horton’s system correctly rejected my second attempt. This was also shown as rejected on the 3V Visa system.

Then I remembered my experience with this pre-paid product at Home Depot. I wondered to myself (since no one else was around at the time) if my attempts were rejected for the same reason as Home Depot had several days later rejected my attempted use of this product on theirweb site; this phantom additional $1 charge.

So, I then tried a 3rd time and attempted to use $15 of the pre-paid card (remember, I did not yet know that the 1st attempt was accepted by the 3V Visa system to bring the pre-paid voucher’s balance down to zero). It was rejected for a 3rd time by Tim Horton’s system.

Ugh.

Now when I looked at my wife’s Tim Card account it simply shows that for all three attempts the ‘Credit card charge failed’.

This all happened on a Saturday. I emailed my 3V Visa contact as well as the Customer Support of 3V Visa directly but heard nothing until Monday. Monday through Thursday the 3V Visa and Tim Horton’s customer service representatives went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth by phone and email.

No resolution.

Friday I emailed the 3V Visa Customer Support person to ask what was happening; was this now a dead issue since I never paid for their voucher (remember, I simply received it free from 3V Visa’s PR firm to try out)?

Over the weekend, no response.

It appears that the Customer Support  for 3V Visa does not work weekends…..at least not in a way which is communicated back to me.

So, after more than a week (mroe than a week from when I tried to use it at Tim Horton’s on-line web site? yes) of no resolution the $20 was put back on my 3V Visa voucher.

I asked if I should try Tim’s again. After no response from the 3V Visa people I decided to try it the next day.

I did.

Same result. It was rejected

Tim Horton’s representative emailed be a few hours later via email to indicate “…this card will never work for reloading because Tim Hortons does require the security code to be matched and that won’t be possible if the Visa Gift Card issuer doesn’t support it.”

As of this writing, my wife still has only $1.97 on her Tim Card.

Is this the fault of 3V Visa? Well, the lack of demonstrated customer support on the weekend sure is.

And, if you purchased the 3V Visa pre-paid voucher, gave it to a friend or relative as a gift and they encountered the same situations as I had, how would you feel? How would they feel about you?

So far, still two thumbs way, way down.

You are better off purchasing a pre-paid gift card (if you must) from the retailer or shopping mall where you want them to purchase something. Or, better yet, take all of 60 seconds, withdraw the amount of money from your bank account and give it to the person to whom you intended to give this pre-paid card as a gift.

A lot less hassles and waste of your time on their part and on yours.