Visa Authorizations Slow Down During The Holiday Season

Once again we find ourselves in the midst of the Holiday hustle and bustle and it seems that, while time is speeding up, everything around us slows down. Traffic, lines at the mall, even the Internet seems sluggish as we enter into this Christmas season.

This concept is especially true when it comes to using your Visa card. Picture yourself driving down the road getting ready to enter the local Mall for some holiday shopping. Suddenly, up ahead you see Christmas lights – no wait. Those are tail lights! Hundreds upon hundreds of tail lights and brake lights flashing intermittently. You begin to tap the break to slow down and eventually grind to a stop. What’s the deal, you think, All I want to do is get to the Mall! The problem is - so does everyone else.

So when you go to use your Visa card at a merchant, remember that most of the nation is, at that very same moment, using their Visa cards at merchants and the lines to get to Visa can sometimes be fairly jammed with “traffic.” This results in longer waits as the merchant attempts to get an authorization and can even cause system time-outs (“timing out” is when too much time has passed between the authorization request and an answer to the request – sometimes merchants see a time-out as a decline, when, in fact, the terminal has just gotten tired of waiting for an answer).

Please remember that the longer Holiday waits are just part of the Christmas season shopping experience and are nothing to be alarmed about.

It would also be useful to give yourself a good 24-hour leeway between making a payment and having those funds available via your SELCO Visa Debit card. Or, for a $5 update fee, you can request to have SELCO update your Visa Debit card availability immediately through the Phone Branch.

Andy Duffield
SELCO Visa & Card Services