Quick Question re Credit Card Charges

Hi,

Companies CAN still charge you an admin fee as long as it applies to other forms of payment too. You were pretty lucky to find a dealer who will accept a credit card payment...

The issue with CC fees is that a retailer is not permitted to discriminate between payment methods. In practice this means they can only add a surcharge if they apply the same surcharge to all forms of payment. In other words, if they also charge a fee for cash/cheque payments then it is fine for them to charge you a fee for credit card usage.

The way you phrase your original post it seems fairly clear that the retailer is discriminating here and wouldn't be making a surcharge for cash. So, they are acting incorrectly and shouldn't be charging any extra for the card.

The question is, does your granddaughter's friend actually want to buy this car? Kicking up a fuss won't help because the retailer could quite simply say they won't accept the card for payment. Paying by cash (with presumably no fee) doesn't help with the interest free utilisation. Paying the fee is annoying but they still get the 27 months without any CC interest and 3% spread over 2 years isn't so bad.

Of course, they could pay the fee, take the car and then complain to the card issuer. The issuer may pass the complaint to the retailer's bankers and you may get something out of it - but I doubt it. If paying the fee, make sure it is itemised as a fee and not just included in the price on the receipt.

Nick_C wrote: »

In situations like this, a Curve card can be useful. The retailer treats it as a Debit Card but Curve pass the charge through to a linked credit card.

Initial Curve limits start at £10K a year and £2K a day, but increase to £50K and £3750 after a few months use.

If the car is less than £4K, you could maybe do two Curve transactions on consecutive days.

It takes about a week to apply for and set up a Curve card.

Don't know anything about Curve but it looks interesting. The question here is how does the item appear on the destination card account? Does it appear as a 'sale' with the retailer's name, or does it appear as 'something else' with 'Curve' as the retailer description? The only reason I ask is because OP needs this to appear as a 'sale' on the credit card to qualify for the interest-free period.

Because all disputes are to be addressed through Curve rather than the actual destination card issuer I'm wondering what method Curve actually uses to pass the transactions on.

Nick_C wrote: »

Curve transactions appear on my credit card statement as "CRV*" and then the retailer name.

From today, Curve will also be passing Merchant Category Codes to the card issuer. Up until now, there has been a loophole where people could use their Curve card to get cash from an ATM with the charge going to a credit card. The MCC will enable the type of business that you have paid with your Curve card, and will enable them to identify cash withdrawals apparently.

Apologies to OP for the diversion.

So Curve effectively performs the role of a pseudo-Card Issuer (by providing a line of credit up front) and then 'converts' itself into a retailer to process a transaction through to a physical Card Issuer.

Because the use of the MCC seems to be key in telling the physical Card Issuer whether the transaction is cash or a purchase that suggests it is being processed through using the '05' Sale Transaction Code. If this is true then OP should have no trouble getting the interest-free option for a purchase on their Barclaycard.

I presume there are safeguards to prevent you from linking other people's credit cards into your Curve 'wallet'?