BoN, Its hardly a dishonest transaction with nil value to boot. Just surprised that entering card details with no address or other details to check it is bound to reject your transaction. Just surprised it was not instant.
It's not necessarily
bound to get rejected because not all transactions go online to verify your account. If you present your card in a store there are all manner of things that come into play first - issuer action codes, terminal action codes, card action codes, floor limits, stand in limits and a multitude of other factors; all of them have to come into alignment before the POS terminal decides to go online to verify everything is correct. In these days of icc cards you might be surprised how infrequently that actually happens. Obviously, for customer not present transactions the vast majority will still go online but for a zero value transaction I thought there was a good chance that it wouldn't. As you say though, it's odd that it accepted the order and then rejected it after the fact. Presumably it's doing some basic offline validation and then sticking it in a queue for the back end processing to keep the user experience quick.
Anyway, that's kind of a moot point as it wasn't doing that that fecked things up, it was the "use this card" button meaning not "select this card" as I expected and instead meaning "pay now using this card"!
It's not the nomenclature I'd have given it, anyway!