Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

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Googler, opinions are my own.

Corporate cards have some of extra handling to deal with them. I know I tried to buy a WASD keyboard using a corp card, and their payment processor didn't let me use it either.

Looking around, it looks like when a Corp Card is issues (Capital one example[0]), they can lock the card to only be allowed with certain MCC (merchant category code). These are the codes that say what kind of product is being purchased. So it's possible the issuer of your corp card locked your card to certain MCCs. If your card in MCC locked, the merchant and processor likely won't know this until the payment has been tried, and there is a good chance the network/bank didn't send back a useful error code.

[0] PDF: https://www.capitalone.com/commercial/decomm/media/doc/treas...

I'm sorry, but if this is the cause, it's complete and utter bullshit on Google's part. B2B is their bread and butter. They should have this (paying via a corporate card) shit figured out (or at least not give opaque reasons to the failures).

You should be able to handle for this by card type? When I wrote merchant software way back, we could separate restricted corporate cards from standard cards prior to processing, because we had to send itemized purchase records for corporate cards in a special format as part of the approval request. I believe corporate cards had their own card ranges and it was trivial to determine if you have the card number.

A funny story. Because they shoehorned this functionality into a fixed length messaging spec instead of repeating segments, we could only send like 12 items. Anything after that was just approved. If I remember correctly the same spec applied to EBT purchases as well. I'm sure they use a different message format now and you totally can't get away with buying 12 things and then beer with an EBT card.

I believe AMEX tries to mix all of their card types together (prepaid, corp, etc..), so you can't do that. But I do agree for MC and Visa, I think you can figure out many of these with BIN information.

My physical cards are separately labeled on every crap BIN site as corp or personal and the card type.

If I generate a one time use card from enterprise account, it shows up as PERSONAL CREDIT GOLD, interestingly.

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