GlobalCollect payment issue (completing a purchase eventually fails)

[Elucidator]

Issue summarized:
Currently, attempting to purchase a product while paying through a service that tunnels the financial transfer process called GlobalCollect will fail.


Details background:
Some payment methods are indirect and use a payment transfer provider service. A common one used in europe is GlobalCollect. PaySafeCard, iDEAL, Skrill, etc. uses this service to handle transfer of the payment when it came from within the EU somewhere.

A purchase made that uses this service will have 'Steampowered through GlobalCollect' as 'receiver information' of the money transfer note or receipt info.

GlobalCollect is nowadays known as Ingenito ePayments
See: https://www.ingenico.com/finance/focus/globalcollect.html
Ingento was however acquired by Worldline, and became a subdiary.

According to their server status page:
https://ingenico-ogone.statuspage.io/
Ingenico should be online, operational. Transactions using the service should be possible.


Details Issue:
Purchasing a product using ingenico's service fails and the reason seems to lie somewhere in the Steam Store from the customer's perspective.
Through ideal: The bank succesfully transfers money to GlobalCollect / ingenico with the order of sending it to steampowered. (money gets written from people's bank accounts)
Through PaySafeCard, the card succesfully deducts money from the card, sending it to GlobalCollect.

The problem is that the money never seems to arrive at Steam according to the endlessly seeming 'busy' status. This makes a purchase unable to complete and so the bought products do not get added to the customer's Steam account. Companies involved in the payment are sending every signal that the money is now in Steam's possession and with it expect a purchase to have been finished (at least from what a customer can tell from their point of viewl), but the 'busy' status never changes to 'finished' and so the products never arrive. Seemingly Steam thinks it never received any money from the customer and keeps waiting for it.


I read about this issue at first from many posts on the Steam Discussion Boards. I also read on steamstat.us that the steam store has issues, but not exactly which.

In retrospect and due to incomplete information in these places, I decided to test buying and paying for a game myself to see what exactly is going on here, and; it seems people were indeed right. They never seem to receive their game after completely paying for it and seemingly finishing the purchase from their end.

Judging from the status page ingenico shares, as well as the bank activity, the problem seems to be communication between Steam and Ingenico.
Steam doesn't seem to receive the signal that the money is now in their hands, and due to this people cannot obtain their games. Something is as such wrong there. Ingenico claims that it has send the money to Steam, along with a receipt I suppose, and yet somehow fails to automatically communicate this. (Again, according to their server status page they're completely online, but this has also been confirmed by a user on the discussion boards (see edit below)). So from the looks of things, it seems that the system on Steams end fails to confirm that they received the payment.

So in my guess, to me it seems like something is odd in the backend at financial processing.
I was wondering if you could take a look.


Steps to reproduce:
(in the Steam Client, though likely this also happens in the browser)
- pick a game
- add to chart
- buy the game
- accept the terms, fill in the form.
- pick paysafecard or ideal as payment method (or some other that uses globalcollect)
- continue checking out.
- succesfully complete checking out (paying for it).

Result:
At the end of the payment process, you will see the green button in the store having changed to 'busy'. The product is still inside your shopping cart. Steam Support has registered you trying to buy the product and says that it may take 2 hours . You can try contacting steam support after two hours, but I assume they have got their hands full. I don't think people want their money back anyway, they just want the game or whatever they bought.


What I expect instead:
The purchase was completed, so I expect it to detect this properly, register the game to my steam account and update my game library so that I may download and play it.


Edit:
I read on the Help forum, that one user reported that they contacted Ingenico ePayments (GlobalCollect), and they explained the money was already send towards Steam.
This too highly suggests something is wrong in your financial processing backend at the moment.

Edit (2h later):
Skrill also uses GlobalCollect (ingonico epayments). People using Skrill face the same problem.

Edit (30 minutes later):
Judging from the Steam Support statistics, it seems to me that most people remain quiet about it. There is a diffident raise in 8000 steam support tickets, but I can't say if these are all due to this payment issue. I myself haven't made any Support tickets. I plan on waiting it out, but just saying that it does seem to affect more people. (I suppose a problem is that it just happened during a sale too)

Edit (again):
It turns out the wait isn't endless. The system retroactively turn it into a wait of 2 hours, even if you waited for 3 or 4. (some people waited for 6 hours.) If the status hasn't changed yet, the system will change the status to Failed Purchase at some point
retroactively; meaning any amount of aditional wait is deducted from the 3 day retry on the purchase thing. It seems like Steam cannot tell that the money is already in their possession. Due to this, I can't say if the payment is ever charged back, but considering they claimed they 'don't accept the payment', in all likelihood at some point it will be put back where it came from.
The point is, this stuff needs some checking. If I were to attempt to rebuy that with the same shopping cart within three days, likely payment will fail again.

[reinspaan]

Thank you for this explanaition! The same thing happened to me, and I'm confused about what will happen now. Do I get my money back?

[Elucidator]

The issue is heavily escalating on the discussion boards as many are affected.
example post:

Originally posted by rsqualityservice:

I called global collect services. Who provide collect services for steam.
They checked the payments. And confirmed they procesed the payment for steam. And that many more people called them. And they confirmed that steam has it. And she said steam has an proces problem with payments. So what i say is true. She gave me the phone number to call steam. And i called them.
Wanne know what they confirmed..
So being dishonered or not in truth..
Steam should provide a better customer service and info if they have troubles..
Steam number
0014258899642
Global collect service
[phone]

I checked the details. The +14 number is indeed valve's phone number. And the +31 number is oddly still being used by GlobalCollect, primarily by consumers.

that said, it seems Ingenico rather has people contacting the webshop instead of them. (they assume they're doing their job) (see Worldline - Ingenico ePayments FAQ for details on this)
This consumer phone number is currently seemingly used only as a last resort in case of a payment failure.

The user posted their transaction id in a later post, but I consider that personal information so I wont copy this. If you wish to phone them and need a transaction id,
I recommend instead to find your own tranaction id in your transaction receipt.
keep in mind that apparently their phone line is being overused at the moment, you may need to wait for a while.

As to answer your question:

Originally posted by reinspaan:

I'm confused about what will happen now. Do I get my money back?

I don't know what Steam's plan is. Either they will send the money back or they will complete the purchase anyway. I mean they have your money.
Maybe it depends on what you ask as well in your support ticket.

I decided to send a ticket to support as well to ask what they plan on doing with the money I indirectly send to them (I tried keeping it short and simple so they could answer faster); obviously there hasn't been an answer to that yet due to the support ticket overload issue they have currently.


Edit:
The amount of Support tickets steam support received about Help with Purchases, that haven't been answered yet increased from 17500~ ish to now 25,236 in somewhat over half a day.
xD, the total amount of support tickets that haven't been answered yet increased by about 10000.
Its highly likely that most of this is due to the GlobalCollect issue. And my ticket is between that number now I suppose. Anyway, for anyone reading: have patience.

Edit 2 (2 hours later)
A quick update.
The status of my purchase changed from failed to succeeded, but I didn't receive any notification of this or when this happened. (It took 17 hours, not 2 xd)
Support ticket hasn't been answered yet, but I suppose it seems no longer needed.

Edit 3 (8 hours later)
Steam Support answered my ticket about 1.5h ago and told me the issue should at least for me be resolved. So I closed the ticket. Thanks Steam.
but the question remains if the issue is resolved. xD
Just to note for other people: it took about 25 hours before steam support replied, despite them not having to in my case so they're indeed quite busy.

Edit 4 (which is 42 hours later):
The problems seem to have been resolved. No new posts about failed payments have been noticed. I suspect Steam Support is resolving any issues should they arrise considering this, so I'm not sure if the problem is fixed; but from our point of view:

It seems like you fixed it.

[Solid]

Nope, I just stepped into this problem. Bank-account tells me I was charged money for the product I bought, Steam purchase on the other hand failed.
I wrote the Support, let's see what's going to happen further on.

Edit: Just as I wrote this comment, I decided to take a look at my Library. Hold your breath... The game has been added to it, so even if it fails, the Steam product can still be added randomly afterwards. Took about 40 minutes.

[Elucidator]

Originally posted by Solid:

Nope, I just stepped into this problem. Bank-account tells me I was charged money for the product I bought, Steam purchase on the other hand failed.
I wrote the Support, let's see what's going to happen further on.

I made the thread a year ago. What you're refering to is a whole new issue.

Anyway try contacting Steam Support and give them your transaction ID and the timestamp.

GlobalCollect is a type of debit transaction, so a direct-bank-transaction, done through third parties.
The description of the transaction on your bank account should have all the information you need.
After sending the info to Steam Support, try to wait for a while. Depending on how many problems there are it could take a day or more unfortunately, but your purchase will then be completed by the Staff working there instead.
Don't buy the same product twice. (if you do this, they will refund the second purchase, but it just adds additional problems.)

Anyway, next time, unless you have something meaningful to add please don't necropost this thread. The issue that happened in 2022 was fixed. Any new issues are separate issues and as such, separate bugs or glitches on the backend. The issue you experience is a different one.

edit: I didn't see the edit when I made this post. I type too slow.