Why was my credit card declined?

Reviewed  April 8th, 2021  by Michael Nilsson


If your credit card was declined, it means that your bank or credit card vendor declined the payment request. Unfortunately, banks don't provide any insight into why they're declining a payment. This is annoying for everyone, and there's nothing we can do on our end to fix this issue since the restriction is coming from your bank or card issuer. The only way to resolve it is for you to contact your bank or card issuer to see if they have imposed a restriction and, if so, to ask them to remove the restriction.

There are several different reasons your card might have been declined.

  1. Insufficient funds in the account connected with your credit card.
  2. Some cards have restrictions on cross-border usage. If the card was issued in a country (the 'origin' field when you view the payment details) other than where the business is located, this might be the problem. Though our business is located in the United States, our credit card processor is currently located in Ireland. We're working on moving it to the US and expect the transition to be completed by summer 2019.
  3. Some cards (often corporate cards or FSA cards) can only be used for certain business categories, like travel or healthcare.

We strongly recommend reaching out to your bank or card issuer to see if they have imposed a restriction and, if so, to ask them to remove the restriction. This process is inconvenient, for which we apologize, but is usually effective. If you try this and they are unable to fix the issue, we may be able to set up a link so that you can pay with your credit card via PayPal. Because our team needs to manually create a PayPal invoice each time a payment is required, we require customers to purchase 6 or 12 months at a time when using this method. This process involves a single charge to your card and not a recurring payment. If you decide to purchase 12 months, you'll be on the annual plan and will save 20% of the cost of the monthly plan each month, and you will also have access to Analytics & Reporting for all of your tools.


Related articles