I ran into a problem with Walmart Pay.

Hopefully this helps, let me know if you have any ideas for me.

Problem:

Today I tried to buy a $50 Visa (variable card, the clerk input the amount) plus some tea, using Walmart pay at a human checkout. Total purchase $60. I got the text message that my card was charged without the card present, and my balance decreased as expected. However, the transaction was stuck on pending within the Walmart pay app for over a minute, so I left my items with the cashier and left. A few hours later, it is still pending. I did not receive any fraud alerts/confirmation requests via text or email from SYW. To be clear, when I say "pending," I mean that the Walmart pay app says it's pending, and Walmart support says it's pending on their end. This is different from the expected situation, where it would exit the pending status right away and let me check out with my stuff. Of course the charge is also still pending on my card, but that's not the weird part.

Trying to fix it:

I called SYW consumer protection number, and they said that the charge went through and there was nothing unusual about it. I called Walmart, they gave me the runaround for a long time but I eventually got to someone who seems useful. I said that I wanted to make sure that they could tell that the transaction failed, and I wanted to know why it failed so I could prevent this in the future. They confirmed that they could tell it was stuck in a pending state (so I wouldn't be able to take my items), and they said that they would contact the technical team, and the technical team would call me back in a few days. They emailed me a case number, so I feel somewhat optimistic that this won't just disappear into the void.

Customer service strategy:

In case anyone is interested, the way that I got to this person was that I called 1800-WALMART, selected the choices for talking about a store experience, they redirected me to the Walmart.com people, the Walmart.com people said that they were going to send me back to the store people, I asked for a manager, they said that they would send me back to the store people again, I asked them to talk to the store people directly and tell them that they needed to help me, then I got to a store person who was actually useful and set up the technical team contact. Before all of this, I talked to the actual customer service desk in the store. They were the ones who suggested that I call Walmart. At some point during the call, the people on the phone tried to get me to talk to the service desk in the store, and I had to tell them that the customer service desk didn't know anything about Walmart pay and that's why I called them. So I guess ultimately it was the people on the phone who deal with the store that ended up getting me in touch with the technical team, but I'm not sure it had to be that way. Either way, at least this time my strategy of forcing the two departments to talk to each other (instead of kicking me back and forth) worked, at least to get me to this point.

Background:

The failed payment was using Walmart Pay with my SYW card. I have made many in-store Walmart purchases in the past with this same setup for similar amounts, but I have never bought any gift cards and I have always used the self-checkout in the past. I have never used any of Walmart's money services, bought or liquidated any MOs, loaded Discover or prepaid cards, bought any phone cards, made wire transfers, made a purchase over $200, returned anything, received a refund, or done anything else that I would consider "suspicious." I'm always just buying food and toiletries and stuff, and I've spent more than $60 in the past through SYW+Walmart pay. This is a Walmart that I've been to before multiple times. I had not bought anything at any Walmart in the week leading up to that. My internet was fine, my Walmart account was loading in the app, and of course Walmart Pay was able to send the amount to SYW so that my card was charged. Right after the failed transaction, I was able to make a small purchase at a gas station with the physical card and I was able to make a small purchase at Kroger using Kroger Pay. Right before the failed transaction, I was able to make a $70 online purchase with no issues.

I would understand if SYW thinks I'm suspicious, as I have called them in the past about the promotional offers. But everything seems to have worked on the SYW end, and I think it's a Walmart Pay issue (let me know if you disagree). Presumably either they didn't like that I was buying a gift card or it was a fluke/glitch.

Someone else on DoC had an issue with straight-up declines from Walmart pay after making a few large gift card purchases. I think that's a different issue because the charges never made it to SYW.