Just a quick quip on an interesting interaction with BestBuy.com support. I received a called from "Restricted" on which I was advised by someone purporting to be from BestBuy.com that my back-ordered purchase was not successfully receiving a credit card authorization. It turns out that BestBuy.com re-authorizes the credit card transaction every 5 days. When an item is back-ordered for a long time, this eventually results in the issuing bank blocking further transactions. BestBuy.com support then called me to request that I call my card issuing bank and ask them to approve the authorization. SERIOUSLY?!? Quite literally, by following a stupid practice that they know causes problems, they've chosen to make it the customer's problem rather than fix their process.
What I find interesting here is that, really, there should only ever be 2 transactions. At the time of purchase there should be an authorization check, and then nothing further should happen until the product is ready to ship. At the ship time, the card should be run and charged, and if that fails, then and only then should BestBuy.com support be triggered to call the person. And, at that, a phone call shouldn't even be necessary. A simple "We're ready to ship, but your credit card declined." email would be more than adequate. Provide a contact number if more information is needed, but that's about it.
Of course, in either case there's a significant fraud risk. My example reads like a possible phish. *sigh* But the phone call wasn't much better. And, what's really weird is that they asked me to call my bank. Imagine running a scam where you're trying to make a false charge and it's being blocked. Just call the consumer and ask them to unblock it? Really? *sigh* Maybe it would be better simply to cancel the order if the credit card fails, requiring the user to go purchase it again? I'm sure business would love to hear that solution... of course, I wonder how much money they're spending on these phone calls asking people to unblock their repetitive authorization charge?
