Lowe's VGC
 

Anyone else having issues with activation at Lowe's? The last few times I've purchased 5 VGCs and 2 or 3 do not get activated.

The receipt shows that it does not get activated and the CSR refund me immediately.

I'm just curious what's causing the issue.

Yes, I had the same thing happen to me this weekend. It wasn't just VGC's at my store, but included several Amazon and a couple of gas g-cards.
The first transaction went through all the way through payment, then as it was activating the cards it came to the 1st one and a huge pop up on the registers screen noted xxxx123 was 'declined' and to 'please activate a NEW CARD".
The new cards didn't work. We tried a few. Then they credited my cc for the ones that didn't activate. We continued to try several, found a couple of good ones and went through with the sale.
Leaving the building I immediately called the ## on the cards to hear the balance, then hurried to liquidate.

There is a discussion over at DOC about this. There is a velocity limit of 3 cards per hour, per store. It apparently does not matter what register you buy it at, if you do multiple transactions, if you use a different CC etc. The limit is for the entire store. Seems to only affect VGC and not others like restaurants, etc, but nothing 100% confirmed.

I personally stick to 2 at a time.

Last month, I was able to buy 5x on multiple days.

Today, after the refund at CS desk, purchasing 2 still did not activate.

poster above you mentioned Amazon and gas GCs

Strange. I was able to do five all at once. That was probably 3 weeks ago, though. Wonder if they've changed something in their system or if it's a store-specific.

It's very possibly store specific. There were a few people reporting the limit of 3 over on DoC, one claimed that the store employee was told this over the phone by somebody at the corporate office (while they were on the phone processing the refund for the un-activated cards)

It works to buy $1,000 all at once at some stores. It's pretty ridiculous that the limit is per store, as if we would know what other customers are buying at the same store. There is no such limit at Office Depot even though their gift cards are serviced by the same company. At least the 10% Amex offer still gets credited on refunded purchases.

It must be store specific, bought 5 $200 DEVGC in one transaction, paid fees with 3% CC and $1K with AXPSC. All were supposedly activated instantly but when I checked balance in parking lot, only 3 had balance while two of them gave error messages. Went to next door WMsuper to shop and when I checked again, two were activated so I drained 4 to $799.12 MGMO and loaded one to prepaid.

Yes, it seems so. I tried to buy 8 Amazon GCs ($100) + DE visa. Only 6 Amazon GCs got activated and rest had to be refunded. Backoffice lady said that it is number of GCs (doesn't matter type) in a single transaction - something to with fraud prevention. Best to buy 5 GCs or less in a single transaction. I usually do it this way & this was first time I exceeded that. Most folks in Lowes look at you like criminals when you go there with more than 2 GCs anyway.

You will see a crawl back. May not happen right away but it will. It will first show under My Savings, and then become posted transaction with reversal of the previous credits. Then you get back the "room" to earn the credit, up to the $100 allowed. The history shown under My Savings would disappear completely. The crawl back on our cards happened on statement closing date. Subsequent purchases earned back the credit.

It is Velocity issue. You can either try to avoid the issue by limiting to 3 cards per hour at same store, or take the chance and wait for the nonactivated cards to activate later.

It may also be regional. All Lowes in my area act the same, 3 cards per hour at the same store regardless which card is used and at which register. Every store here that allows CC payment has had this velocity limit per different people's experiences. When this first happened, the CS manager called help desk when she could not figure out why 2 cards not activated. Help Desk told her the velocity limit, and Help Desk performed a refund remotely - as in that she and I watched the register screen on entries appeared when the refund was processed. Both the initial 5 cards transaction and the 2 cards refund posted on the same day in the AMEX account.

I've done all my purchases at the same store.

They must have changed the velocity limit as I was able to purchase multiple 5x last month.

Last week I had 2 failures on 2 different days.

5x purchase only only 3 got activated, 2x were refunded and I attempted 2x more and only 1 activated, 1x refund.

another day last week, 5x purchase, only 3x got activated, 2x were refunded. 2x purchase, 2x refund.

In my area the velocity limit has been in place since June. There are a few FTers in my area and we compared notes. When I encountered this it was mid june, when the Lowes offer resurfaced so I was able to add to our cards. It turned out another FTer had already encountered this restriction, at 2 different stores, the first few days of June as he added the Lowes offer when it first came out on June 1st.

Store managers at first thought the cards were bad but subsequent b2b transactions failed again so it was not bad card issue. It was not until I came across this issue, 2 out of 5 not activated, subsequent retry of 2 again and both failed, that my store's CS manager decided to call Help Desk to figure out what was going on, we found out the 3 cards per hour limit for each store.

Once we identified the issue, we know what to do to avoid triggering it. No reason to keep trying when the issue is identified. It is a very annoying experience, and store manager hates to deal with it so it is better to avoid triggering it - makes it easier for everybody.

I guess my store now has the 3 per hour restriction based on my last experience.
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Does anyone have recent experience with velocity limits? Specifically is it a certain $ amount per hour?