Open Edge Duplicate charges
Anyone else experience "random" duplicate charges in open edge? And have you traced it to the speed/reliability (or lack thereof) of your internet?
These are not the duplicate charges that warn the staff about running the same card a second time. These are charges that show up once in RGP and twice in the bank.
Just throwing this out there...
Thanks.
Comments
Hi Jake
We had a support exchange about this last week. I am confident, based on the information provided, that the card was inserted twice into the EMV device. The charges were a minute apart. If OE duplicated the transaction, the charges would be been much more close in time. We've researched dozens and dozens of these over the years, and it always comes back to the card being run twice.
Have you contacted OE to see if the card was in fact inserted twice? The EMV system has extensive logging, and they'll be able to definitely prove if the card was inserted twice or not.
Working on the assumption that the card was inserted twice, then the better question becomes why didn't OE kick back a duplicate warning?
The RGP/OE integration is designed to warn against duplicate transactions. This is to deal with the case that the first transaction gets lost to RGP (because of a transmission failure), but did in fact process at OE. The staff will naturally retry the card out of confusion, OE will kick back the duplicate warning, and the staff can respond appropriately to the popup window about how to handle the duplicate warning.
But, in this case, it seems like the staff didn't get the duplicate warning - at least, I see no evidence that they got the dup warning.
One possibility is that the first transaction was held up for some reason... and processed concurrently or nearly concurrently with the second (retry) transaction. Even though the first transaction appeared lost to the staff and they retried the card - it was still "pending" and hit concurrently with the second transaction. I can't say I've seen this, but it is a possibility and I could imagine it would result in not seeing a dup warning.
Ultimately, this is one of the downsides to EMV. The old mag swipes processed within a few seconds, while EMV transaction are "open" for upwards of 30 seconds. This unfortunately expands the window of time when crazy stuff can happen.
So you can sleep better at night, I suggest contacting OE to find out if this was a legit second charge on the card... at least you'll know one way or the other :) I suspect the answer will be YES.
As for why no duplicate warning was presented.... I really don't know. But I have no evidence that there is a systemic problem of this happening, despite processing 200,000+ transactions per month.
We certainly get plenty of support inquires regarding duplicate charges resulting from the staff mis-handling the duplicate warning, but as described above - I don't think that was the case here. My theory - the staff ran the card twice, and for reasons undetermined, there was no duplicate warning.
Hope this helps
Andy
Just closing this out - mystery solved on the lack of the dup warning. Their facility was set at OpenEdge to only warn for dups within 1 minute instead of the recommended 15 minutes.
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