Friendgiftr doesnt want my money

i thought Friendgiftr was pretty cool.  but not so much anymore.

i read about this company on Mashable here.  Friendgiftr lets you buy and send gift cards on facebook.  it’s a really cool concept.

i mean, seriously.  facebook is the ultimate in connecting with familiar friends and classmates, friends who are acquaintances, close friends, family, and new friends.  i’ve got 677 friends on my facebook that fit these categories.  theres no way i have all their contact info like addresses or phone numbers.  that’s just too many!

but the fun thing about facebook is being able to celebrate whatever your category friend is doing from afar.  if they graduate, youre happy.  if they pass a test, youre happy.  if their first child starts walking, youre happy.

friendgiftr wants to take that to the next level and give you an easy way to be happy AND get those friends of yours a gift.

all you have to do is go to friendgiftr.com, click on the facebook icon, and it will port you to the friendgiftr facebook app where you can type in your friends name.  facebook will auto-fill names as you type and you can easily click on your friends facbeook profile name.  then, you enter in your friends email address and your billing info and voila, you’ve bought a card.

now.

friendgiftr has a partnership with icardgiftcard.com.  these are the people who do the backend processing of payments, etc.

i don’t know which one messed up but somebody did because these sites won’t let me buy a giftcard!

i know i’m a broke doctor in training but i do have enough money on my credit card and my debit card for a 20 dollar transaction.  i wanted them to take my money but no luck.

i have a friend graduating from nursing school so i wanted to surprise her with a giftcard to fandango using friendgiftr.  after placing my order, i anxiously awaited my friend to receive it.  well, she didn’t.  and i didn’t hear anything from friendgiftr.  i even saw friendgiftr had charged 20.99 to my card in the pending authorization section.

well, i searched thru my confirmation email and found the link to go to “My Orders.”  this is when i found out that icardgiftcard.com was the backend for Friendgiftr.  so i go to My Orders and it says there were no orders associated with my account.  what?  but the charge is pending on my card?

so after several click throughs to get to the contact us section, i submitted a question.

this is the response from Friendgiftr/icardgiftcard :

okay.  that’s strange.  so i checked my credit card account’s address and  it was the same as it ever was.  but i gave these people the benefit of the doubt and used my debit card instead.  once again, the charge went thru and is being held on my credit card, but the icardgiftcard account showed no orders from me.  so i contact customer service again.  [ another gripe is that their "Update Question" button doesn't work on two different browsers, so you have to submit a new question for the same order number ]

allright now.  at this point, i’ve used two DIFFERENT cards where BOTH addresses are the SAME as the one i enter into the order form.  what is this infamous matching problem?  and why have i NEVER encountered this before with ALL my other online transactions???  so i gave up on friendgiftr but i wanted to inform them to investigate into this problem, as clearly they are losing revenue from this Matching glitch.  so i submit yet another ticket to Customer Support.

thanks for repeating what you said that this is indeed a Matching problem and missing the point of my comments.  so i had to give it one more shot to get my point across to Debby J, who is the face of Friendgiftr for my transactions.

the problems here are :

1. there was no email notice that the order did not go through
2. there was no email notice that the charge was voided
3. there was no way to rectify the problem

allright, nevermind.
dont try to fix the problem.
dont offer a solution.
just lose a sale and move on.

luckily, i went to Fandango, and they offer to send gift cards electronically if you have that person’s email.  easy.  so that’s what i ended up doing for my Nursing friend.

my credit card worked.

by the way, the charges on my card for Friendgiftr are still pending.  they will likely get dropped off, but you will hear from me if they dont.

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