Thinking about paying cash in the web store? Here's what you need to know.
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,841 Guardian
The new MCOC web store has an interesting feature. Based on location data, the web store will present you with a list of payment options. Some of those are obvious: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, credit card, etc. But then there are some weird ones: CVS, 7-11, even (for some people) Chuck E Cheese. What the heck are those options about?
Most of those are actually ways to pay in-person for the stuff in the store. You could pay by credit card, by debit card, even by cash. But before anyone uses this option, here's what I learned from doing tests on the process.
First, when you buy something from the web store and select one of those payment options, the game will give you essentially an invoice to pay. For me this came in the form of an email from "PayNearMe.com" (different locations might have different processors).
When you are ready, you hit the Pay Now button, you pick a location to pay at, and you get a barcode the store can scan as if it was an item to buy:
If they know what they are doing, they just scan the code and you just pay the bill. It takes between five and fifteen minutes for the transaction to clear (at least in my testing) and then the items are delivered to your account just like with any other purchase.
Pretty straight forward, but what if you pay cash? Well, everything is the same with one twist: there's no way to refund cash.
One thing I decided to test is whether the web store enforced purchase limits. Consider: you can "buy" an item and you get an invoice. Until you pay it, you haven't actually bought the item yet. So what happens if you then instant-buy the item from the store using, say, Apple Pay. You get the item immediately. But now what happens if you take the invoice to the appropriate store and attempt to buy the item again?
Turns out, at least in my testing, the web store accounts for this. If you have already bought the item and reached the purchase limit, you can't buy it again. The transaction will fail. Then what?
Xsolla can't refund cash, so instead it grants you a credit towards your next purchase. However, at the moment this happens rather invisibly. The system doesn't directly tell you this happened. You can trace transactions and receipts, but it isn't obvious. In particular, there's a separate site operated by xsolla (the company that built and operates the web store) called Babka. If you register for a Babka account you can see all of your xsolla transactions, whether they succeeded or failed, and store credits if any.
Credits are automatically applied to the next purchase you make. So if you have ten bucks of credits and you try to buy a 25 dollar thing, the price will actually show as 15 dollars. It doesn't actually say "25 dollars minus 10 dollar credit." It just says 15 dollars.
I actually don't know what xsolla does if you pay in-person by credit card. I don't know if they reverse the charge or if they give you credits. I'm inclined to believe the latter, but I'm not sure. If you're going to pay by credit card anyway, why not just do that on the store instead of in person. Regardless, be aware that failed transactions can happen, and if they happen you might get store credit instead of refund, and this is definitely true for in-person cash transactions.
For those wondering where the web store is, I direct you to my post on that subject: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/339638/psa-heres-where-the-web-store-is-but-dont-take-my-word-for-it
Most of those are actually ways to pay in-person for the stuff in the store. You could pay by credit card, by debit card, even by cash. But before anyone uses this option, here's what I learned from doing tests on the process.
First, when you buy something from the web store and select one of those payment options, the game will give you essentially an invoice to pay. For me this came in the form of an email from "PayNearMe.com" (different locations might have different processors).
When you are ready, you hit the Pay Now button, you pick a location to pay at, and you get a barcode the store can scan as if it was an item to buy:
If they know what they are doing, they just scan the code and you just pay the bill. It takes between five and fifteen minutes for the transaction to clear (at least in my testing) and then the items are delivered to your account just like with any other purchase.
Pretty straight forward, but what if you pay cash? Well, everything is the same with one twist: there's no way to refund cash.
One thing I decided to test is whether the web store enforced purchase limits. Consider: you can "buy" an item and you get an invoice. Until you pay it, you haven't actually bought the item yet. So what happens if you then instant-buy the item from the store using, say, Apple Pay. You get the item immediately. But now what happens if you take the invoice to the appropriate store and attempt to buy the item again?
Turns out, at least in my testing, the web store accounts for this. If you have already bought the item and reached the purchase limit, you can't buy it again. The transaction will fail. Then what?
Xsolla can't refund cash, so instead it grants you a credit towards your next purchase. However, at the moment this happens rather invisibly. The system doesn't directly tell you this happened. You can trace transactions and receipts, but it isn't obvious. In particular, there's a separate site operated by xsolla (the company that built and operates the web store) called Babka. If you register for a Babka account you can see all of your xsolla transactions, whether they succeeded or failed, and store credits if any.
Credits are automatically applied to the next purchase you make. So if you have ten bucks of credits and you try to buy a 25 dollar thing, the price will actually show as 15 dollars. It doesn't actually say "25 dollars minus 10 dollar credit." It just says 15 dollars.
I actually don't know what xsolla does if you pay in-person by credit card. I don't know if they reverse the charge or if they give you credits. I'm inclined to believe the latter, but I'm not sure. If you're going to pay by credit card anyway, why not just do that on the store instead of in person. Regardless, be aware that failed transactions can happen, and if they happen you might get store credit instead of refund, and this is definitely true for in-person cash transactions.
For those wondering where the web store is, I direct you to my post on that subject: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/339638/psa-heres-where-the-web-store-is-but-dont-take-my-word-for-it
5
Comments
I tried to pay at the nearest 7Eleven and they told me their system was down. I'm not driving all the way to the next closeselt one lol.
I mean, at this point I rather just let it expire.
If the writeup is as thorough as DNA normally is, and you don’t actually get the items from Kabam until AFTER paying at these local physical stores, then Kabam is not really out any money or items if you never finish the invoice transaction (No more so than with everyone else who NEVER purchase anything up there).
———
But I’m more curious about the “Failed Transaction” that happens paying the invoice in person if you had proceeded to buy it ONLINE in the meantime (before attempting to pay for it locally at the physical store).
(A) When you go to pay your Invoice in person (after having done the same as an online purchase inbetween), does the transaction initially go thru ? (But then fail at some time after that ?)
or (B) wouldn’t the transaction FAIL right then and there at the cash register (as in, wouldn’t the invoice become invalid and the scanning of it at the cash register would realize that and not allow you to pay for it) ???
The catch I can see is if you attempt to buy a limited item multiple times by starting several transactions before paying for them and then trying to pay for all of them. I don’t know what happens in that case, but based on how I understand the system to work the most likely thing that would happen is all of the transactions would execute and the locations would accept payment, but then you would get an error from Xsolla saying they could not deliver the items (due to the limit) and then they would give you credit to use to purchase future items.
I did include this information in the original article above, but it slipped my mind just now.
Why couldn’t the in-person payment be processed in “real-time” at the (7-11, etc) when they scan the code on your invoice ?
So sounds like maybe the store (7-11, etc) would just be queueing up a record of that invoice's payment, and only transmitting that to Xsolla say at the end of the day?? So they wouldn’t know at time of “scan” that the invoice would no longer be available to process by Xsolla ?