Purchase denied because of email provider

Sam7t

Hi, I recently tried to purchase a TV online during the sales. However, the payment kept failing with a generic "Something went wrong, Your payment was unable to process. Please try again or contact your payment provider". Using different cards and methods (PayPal) resulted in the same error.

Over the next 5 days, I contacted the shop over various support channels, who repeatedly advised trying again or contacting my payment provider.

Finally, they responded that my payments were refused by their payment gateway because the email provider I used is not accepted and "maybe there's just some security reason why our internal team won't allow that email provider on our end."

They've advised trying again using a different email provider, but the sale has since ended as this process took over 5 days. The TV is now £600 more expensive, and they "won't acknowledge the sale price".

Questions:
1. Can a shop legitimately block a purchase because of the email provider I've used? FYI it's ProtonMail who have 50 million+ users

2. I've missed the sale price because they took so long to confirm the cause - should they honour the sale price as the issue was their side and not communicated until days after the sale ended?

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.

powerful_Rogue

Sam7t said:

Hi, I recently tried to purchase a TV online during the sales. However, the payment kept failing with a generic "Something went wrong, Your payment was unable to process. Please try again or contact your payment provider". Using different cards and methods (PayPal) resulted in the same error.

Over the next 5 days, I contacted the shop over various support channels, who repeatedly advised trying again or contacting my payment provider.

Finally, they responded that my payments were refused by their payment gateway because the email provider I used is not accepted and "maybe there's just some security reason why our internal team won't allow that email provider on our end."

They've advised trying again using a different email provider, but the sale has since ended as this process took over 5 days. The TV is now £600 more expensive, and they "won't acknowledge the sale price".

Questions:
1. Can a shop legitimately block a purchase because of the email provider I've used? FYI it's ProtonMail who have 50 million+ users

2. I've missed the sale price because they took so long to confirm the cause - should they honour the sale price as the issue was their side and not communicated until days after the sale ended?

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.

1) Yes

2) No

Just bad luck i'm afraid.

cattie

A shop can refuse a sale for any reason they want, they are not obliged to sell to you. And no even if a shop decided to sell to you, they most certainly do not have to honour the original sale price you saw it at. So it's time to move on.

I've never heard of Proton & probably a huge portion of the population haven't either.

Sam7t

OK that's a shame, never mind.

Thanks for the quick response, much appreciated.

JJ_Egan

Might be worth getting a gmail account if you have problems .

Proton probably the stores mail servers have it blocked due to spam .

Sandtree

cattie said:

A shop can refuse a sale for any reason they want, they are not obliged to sell to you. And no even if a shop decided to sell to you, they most certainly do not have to honour the original sale price you saw it at. So it's time to move on.

They cannot refuse based on protected characteristics (race, religion, sexual orientation etc) however choice of email provider isnt a protected characteristic. 

jimbo6977

Isn't Proton one of those anonymous encrypted "burner" email address providers?
If so I can see why a retailer might be suspicious. 

Bradden

I find it odd that they would block prooton mail as it's is known for it's security. But as it's an IT issue so it doesn't need to make sense.

Sam7t

jimbo6977 said:

Isn't Proton one of those anonymous encrypted "burner" email address providers?
If so I can see why a retailer might be suspicious. 

ProtonMail is a privacy-focused encrypted email provider, but no more disposable than Gmail or other large providers.

The retailer is Samsung and they happy accept account registrations using ProtonMail, it was only their payment gateway arbitrary blocking it. Think that's why it took so long to uncover  the bug.

JetpackVelociraptor

Yes, no, as everyone's said. Most companies that take online payments are signed up to some kind of fraud protection service, given their response I would say that the fraud protection service Samsung is using has flagged the entire ProtonMail userbase as being high risk. No judgement on you for using it, I would expect that they've just had a higher proportion of problems with orders from people with ProtonMail addresses.

My company uses a system, no idea how it reacts to ProtonMail specifically but it assigns a risk score to orders based on the personal details entered during payment, including the email address. If someone's email address has been previously used to scam people or for a higher than normal percentage of returns or chargebacks, it will assign a high risk score to that email and suggest to the retailer that they should reject the order. The system only produces a risk score once payment is attempted as its' connected to the card payment system, so just registering an account on the website wouldn't trigger anything.

Get yourself a Gmail address now and wait for the January sale, it's highly likely the price reduction will be similar.

Murphybear

Like many I had not heard of ProtonMail.  I had a look and don’t know what I was expecting but I was surprised to find it is a Swiss company who says their emails are as secure as the famous Swiss bank accounts (supposed to be the most secure in the world).  I was looking for a totally new email address for my Freecycle account so set one up.  Couldn’t believe how easy it was.