Why was my credit or debit card declined?

We're sorry to hear you have been having some trouble making a payment.

We use Stripe as our payment gateway, one of the largest providers in the world. If there is an issue at their end (extremely rare)... none of our payments go through successfully.

However, when an isolated payment will not process for a single customer... it is most often the bank or prepaid/gift card issuer who will not let the transaction complete.

When this happens, we simply see a "do_not_honor" or "transaction_not_allowed" error code beside the failed payment. For privacy and security reasons, banks never offer a specific reason or explanation why the transaction was not permitted, however as one of their customers, if you were to contact your bank/card issuer directly... they will be able to give you their reason.

We understand this can be very frustrating. Particularly if your card is working fine for local transactions.

The most common reason we hear from customers who have contacted their bank on the phone is cross-border restrictions on their card (e.g. US customer purchasing a product from outside the US - We are based in the UK/Ireland) we see this most often with pre-paid and gift cards.