API Payment Failure for One Customer

Questions
1

I’m not sure what else to do with this, doesn’t seem like a forum topic, more of a question for support, but I can’t figure out how to talk to a support rep.

Everything is working great with our app and the square api setup.

We have an internal test account in our production environment so we can ensure things were going ok with Square, and every month we have been processing payments with that account.

The debit card we use is hooked up to the bank account that square deposits to, so we just end up losing the square commission.

The monthly payment just started failing, its a generic decline error message. All our other customer’s payments seem to be going through fine. There is plenty of money in the account so that is not an issue.

I was able to submit and process a test payment on this same customer account from the square portal.

I really need to understand what’s going on with this, to make sure we aren’t doing something wrong with the api, or if we are going to run into the same challenges with our other customers.

Here is the error that we are getting back from the api call:
GENERIC_DECLINE-Authorization error: ‘GENERIC_DECLINE’- PAYMENT_METHOD_ERROR -

If there is someone else that i should be working with on this, please let me know, i can’t find anyone else to send a support issue to.

Thanks,
Jim

2

With a GENERIC_DECLINE it means that is was declined by the cardholder’s bank. Banks don’t share the exact reason as to why a card is declined, so you may want to have your customer contact their bank directly for more information.

3

So this still doesn’t seem to make sense to me. When done through the API, it fails, when done through the square web interface, it works. Here is what my bank said when I asked them to look into the decline:

Jim, your debit card ending in XXX is active. As a matter of fact, the $5 charge from SQ 150 North XXX was approved and posted on June 24, 2021.

On another note, the $127.38 did not go through because of an issue with the merchant’s payment gateway.

It appears they are saying there is something wrong happening in the payment gateway when I use the api.

Thoughts?

I’m not sure where to go with this.

Thanks,
JIm