Apple Card declined at Apple Online Store

Question

Apple Card declined at Apple Online Store

I recently purchased an iPad at the Apple Online Store. With AppleCare, tax, etc, came to about $900. I received an email from Apple telling me I had insufficient funds to make the purchase, and that I needed to deposit funds or the order would be canceled.

The purchase was made using my Apple Card. I saw $650 of the purchase come through in my Wallet, and called Support to resolve the problem. I was told I could complete the purchase by putting the remaining $250 on my MasterCard on file. Did that and completed the transaction.

But here's the thing: The Apple Card is a virtual card backed by a "real" credit card and card issuer. The MasterCard I used to complete the transaction is that card: The Apple Card and the MasterCard ARE THE SAME CARD ACCOUNT. With 10x the headroom on the account for the purchase I was making.

After literally hours on the phone trying to resolve this with Apple Support, who basically said "gee, we can't see anything wrong", it's now clear I need to talk to the card issuer. but this still exposes a pretty significant hole in the Apple Card ecosystem.

iPad mini 5, iPadOS 15

Posted on Dec 8, 2021 8:06 AM

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Answer 1

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emilio-lizardo Author

Level 1

93 points

Jan 14, 2022 7:19 AM in response to emilio-lizardo

Ah. Solved. In the interim between placing my iPad order and Apple fulfilling it, I dropped by the Apple store and purchased a watch. Default behavior in the online store — and, it turns out, in the physical store — is to first apply any accrued credit toward a purchase and then charge the supplied form of payment. This reduced the amount of credit I had available in my Apple account. When the iPad order was fulfilled some weeks later, the amount of credit in my account was less than the amount specified in the order. Rather than issuing something saying specific, the Apple system kicks out an “insufficient funds” alert, and it took literally five phone calls and a total of three hours before someone at Apple tumbled to the actual problem. Good grief.

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Answer 2

Dec 8, 2021 8:48 AM in response to emilio-lizardo

Followup: Just talked with Goldman Sachs support. They have no idea why the Apple Store declined the transaction. They agree there was plenty of headroom and no flags on the account.

Really weird.

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Apple Card declined at Apple Online Store

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