Floor Limits

Can anyone advise what floor limits are set for the big supermarkets and chains, such as Tesco, WH Smith etc and for which cards (Visa Delta, Switch, Mastercard).

As a poor student I have found that Somerfield always authorises £20 debits, irrelevent of my balance.

In advance, many thanks

Dan

Reply to
dan
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Safeway seems to have a high floor limit for Switch and Visa Debit cards (100+). Solo/MasterCard and Electron always seem to have a zero floor limit there.

Dunno about the new chip and pin cards - I think they have a zero floor there as well.

Simon

Reply to
Simon Ough

Are you saying that the system does not verify that availiable funds exist on the account if someone spends say 50 at safeway?

Say the card is stolen and has been cancelled - isn't there a risk that the card could still be accepted if no check is made?

Reply to
Adrian Boliston

Without a hint of irony, "Adrian Boliston" astounded uk.finance on 14 Apr 2004 by announcing:

That's what Hot Card files are for.

In any case, all transactions under the floor limit are at the merchant's risk. The merchant will pick up the bill for any fraudulent transaction which doesn't have an authorisation code issued by the acquirer.

Reply to
Alex

How often are these files updated? Daily? Weekly? Hourly?

I can remember the days of working in a shop that used one of those old fashioned manual "clunk click" swipe devices and they actually used to send us a long list of "hot cards" every couple of weeks (i think), and I remember trying to commit all the numbers to memory in case a customer tried using a hot card as there was a

50 reward for bagging one, but there were a lot of numbers to remember but it was time consuming to look through the entire list each time a customer came in!
Reply to
Adrian Boliston

Without a hint of irony, "Adrian Boliston" astounded uk.finance on 14 Apr 2004 by announcing:

Normally daily.

Reply to
Alex

Hi

Simon, how do you know that Safeway has a floor limit of £100 for switch, and do you know if all switch limits are higher than visa? DO you know if all the supermarket floor limits for switch would be the same?

Many thanks

Dan

Reply to
dan

At my local supermarket I've notice that my Switch card is never authorised (I never spend more than £30) but my MasterCard is always authorised even if I spend only £2. I've always thought that Supermarkets probably keep a record of cards that go through their systems and only authorise them the first time it sees them, after that it will only authorise them if they've been previously declined.

Out of interest whats the point of a floor limit, why not authorise every transaction? Is there a fee for online authorisation?

Reply to
Marx Peterson

A few pence for each phone call - I think they go via an 0800 number so this would be presumably them recouping the incoming call cost.

Reply to
Adrian Boliston

Without a hint of irony, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com (Marx Peterson) astounded uk.finance on 15 Apr 2004 by announcing:

It's not necessarily the fee (which is negligible in GPRS or other WAN solutions), but the processing time. Online authorisations can add over 10 seconds to each transaction time.

Reply to
Alex

For what legitimate reason do you all want to know this?

Aris

Reply to
aris

I'm a skint student and need to raise some cash to pay for a holiday, but my student loan comes in a few weeks so can repay than. Buy now, pay later sort of thing, not that the bank will like it.

So anyone else know about floor limit figures?????

Reply to
dan

Out of interest, how will floor limits help you raise cash? Are you planning to use your card for purchases instead of cash so you can put the cash to one side or are you going to try and get cashback for lots of purchases?

Reply to
Marx Peterson

"dan" wrote

Ho hum - the kids of today! ;-)

Reply to
Tim

Yeah cashback, but cheques are charged at £27.50 each, whereas debit transactions are charged a monthly fee, a much cheaper option.

So anyone else know anything about floor limits????

Reply to
dan

Without a hint of irony, dan_j snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk (dan) astounded uk.finance on 17 Apr 2004 by announcing:

I think everything you need to know about floor limits has been said already. If you actually want to know the exact figures, you'll need to have access to the relevant records of the acquiring bank or the merchant.

Reply to
Alex

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