I've been using square device at market stalls for years and have been happy with it (with minor issues, but workable), but recently I've been experiencing painful processing outages during PEAK TIMES!
The outage experience happens as follows:
1. Tap customers card for payment
2. App displays "Network issue" message
3. Tap "Try again"
4. App displays "Payment fails"
5. Ask customer to try again with same or different card
6. Experience 1-4 repeats
7. Customer sees bank feed for 2 transactions and asks for refund for one. But square has displayed that both transactions failed and doesnt show on transaction feed. So as the vendor, you are unable to refund and totally confused.
8. Customer gets upset and there's dispute... ultimately you give away the product.
[Later] I find out from support they are pending charges which get refunded to the customer as Square does not claim for the pending charge as the transaction failed. (So for me as it was a Saturday, the customer sees say pending $45 on their bank feed on Saturday and they get a separate $45 refund line item on Monday). Ultimately I've given away products with unsuccessful payments as I'm forced to do so else deteriorate customer relationships. THIS SHOULDN'T HAPPEN!! Square support blamed this on a partner's system outage but this doesn't help me does it?
The fact that this happens during PEAK TIME is even more frustrating as I have to deal with this issue and in the meanwhile am losing sales as people dont have cash or waited too long. This has happened TWICE to me and it's making me question the reliability of the square payment processing. This has also happened to all the other vendors around the same time! So its definately not device specific, seems more network or server related?
First time this happened was on 20th November 2021 between 11.30am - 12.00pm, second time was today on 4th December 2021 between 11.20am and 12.00pm at around Newcastle - NSW.
Luckily i learned a trick from first experience and processed issue payment via manual card entry or asked customer for direct bank transfer.
Though because of this experience, I've decided to buy a competitor's payment product solution as I can't have this keep happening to my business! It's really unfortunate as I have enjoyed Square products and have quite deeply integrated their payment solutions with my business systems...now im forced to look at alternatives.
