Online Clothes Store - THIRTY hard searches for one purchase?

Heartburn

Hi all!

Happy new year to everyone and thanks for the approval, great to be here. I’ve tried to find similar issues but only came across a Barclays thread whereby people had two hard searches done during applications with them.

Im posting here on behalf of my mother, who recently purchased a very small amount of clothes from XXXXX store. She didn’t even realise she’d selected pay via credit option, but didn’t think anything of it as she’s never had an issue and her credit score has always been excellent. 

It was unusual when she told me she’d been denied the purchase and the “credit” - it’s for under £75 worth of items. So I checked her Experian and first I noticed there were 30 hard credit searches recently, which was strange as she very rarely applies for anything of the sort. I took her through the Experian Credit trial setup so we could have a closer look, and over two days (from one attempted purchase), counted 30 instances of hard searches from the same retailer, all of which say “Can impact your Experian Credit Score” as well as an equal number of soft searches.

Is this at all normal?! I can only assume there’s been an automation error here, as I’m pretty sure they should have only made one check, and probably resulted in the credit being “denied”.

I have contacted the retailer for her with the details, but expect them to be most unhelpful and palm the blame on her credit history or something. Is there anything I can suggest she do? Or is this normal behaviour and I’ve just never seen it?

Thanks in advance! 

😊😊

Nasqueron

There should only be 1 unless she somehow clicked it 30 times, you will need to complain to the shop formally and tell them to remove the 29 hard searches that don't apply.
Ignore the nonsense about excellent scores, nobody ever sees that except you, the 30 hard searches will cause problems getting credit for a long time however

DullGreyGuy

Its not that uncommon for there to be multiple checks done on a single application (though normally you are talking 2 maybe 3 not 30) 

I know in the short time I did work in credit our systems ignored multiple searches from the same institute within a couple of days of each other as almost certainly relating to the same credit application and so your 30 searches would count as 1 application in our algorithm. Naturally each lender creates their own logic so others may take a different view