Hi, I’m a developer that has implemented square web payments into our payment portion of our software. The integration has worked well for quite a while, however recently (last 48 hours) one of our clients has experienced a high rate of declines due to:
“GENERIC_DECLINE”,“detail”: “Authorization error: ‘GENERIC_DECLINE’”,“category”: “PAYMENT_METHOD_ERROR”
I believe out of the last 25 attempts for this client, 24 have resulted in this error. Has there been any changes to the API that I might need to update our code for? I doubt this is the case as other clients don’t seem to be experiencing this issue. Any help or insight you can offer would be much appreciated.
Please note, that I’m not listed on their account but I do have access to their AppID, Access Token and also the json responses that we receive back from our requests.
Thanks in advance,
Larry
When they got this error did they instruct the customer to contact their bank? If so what did the bank say was the reason for decline. A GENERIC_DECLINE is when Square received a decline without any additional information. If the payment information seems correct, the buyer can contact their issuer to ask for more information. 
Hi Bryan. Thanks for the quick response.
No, we haven’t reached out to the individuals to contact their bank. Our message that we display to the user on an unsuccessful payment attempt is usually the parsed response that we get from the processor. In this case it would have been something like “Credit Card Declined: Authorization error: 'GENERIC_DECLINE”. Please contact the conference administrator.
In this case, the conference admin reached out to us after being emailed.
I’ve examined the JSON response and the payment info does appear to be correct, however most of the failed transactions (except 1) have an issuing banks outside of North America. I guess I’ll reach out to the conference admin and inform them that the individual needs to contact their bank.
Yeah, you’ll want to have the customer contact their bank. Also to make this a more customer friendly error you may want to obfuscate the GENERIC_DECLINE message and change it to something like: Payment declined, please contact your bank.