My bitpay nightmare
I had been saving up for sometime to purchase some miscellaneous computer and networking equipment. I finally reached my goal by making various trades in the crypto market over the past week. Awesome I thought! And it just so happens that Newegg accepts Bitcoin as payment! What a world we live in!
So as many of you know, the Bitcoin network has been rather congested lately. Between that and fees.... Let me back up....
All of my BTC was spread across two exchanges, Bitstamp and Bittrex. I have never used bitcoin to buy anything other than another cryptocurrency, so this was uncharted territory for me.
I found a video on YouTube of someone making a Bitcoin purchase on Newegg... Looked simple enough even though it was from 2015 (Poor guy paid .4 BTC for a $299 hard drive!).
So I knew that for the purchase process I had a 15 minute window to send my bitcoin to the Newegg provided address.
Back to me complaining about network congestion and fees....I should also add that I was doing this at 3am (and not because I am a night owl, my 1 year old had woken me up and I couldn't get back to sleep).
My impatient self decided that I wasn't going to (and shouldn't have to) send all of my bitcoin to a single wallet in order to send payment to Newegg. I mean, I had 15 minutes to initiate payment so why couldn't I send some from one wallet and some from another?
I click through the Newegg cart and have started the process where an invoice is created and a 15 minute timer is started. I already had both of my Exchange wallets ready to withdraw once I had the send to address.
Cake work. I sent my first payment from Bittrex. Did some quick math to figure out how much my second payment needed to be and send you that amount from Bitstamp. Easy peasy. Wouldn't be long and I would have a confirmed order waiting to ship all the stuff I have been saving for. Or so I thought.
After a couple of minutes I glanced back at the Newegg bitpay invoice and lost my breath. Invoice closed. Under paid. Order failed. SHIT. How could it be under paid!?
The fear really set in when I was presented with my refund option and the refund amount was less than half of the amount of Bitcoin I had sent for payment. WTF!
It's 3:10am I can't scream out loud, my wife would kill me.
I look at the status of the payments on both of my Exchange accounts, successful. SHIT.
I look at the block chain. There they are... My two payments for the exact amount that the bitpay invoice said I under paid. But what can I do? Well at 3:15am I can do next to nothing. Except Twitter.
I tweeted Newegg and bitpay. I fervently refreshed my Twitter app after tweeting, surely someone would respond to me immediately. They didn't. Now it is 3:20am and I am too spooled up to think about sleeping.
Fast forward to 8:00am. I live on the east coast in USA and apparently Newegg operates on the west coast... So I had to wait another 3.5 hours for them to be available.
At 11:30am I'm on their online chat...2nd in the queue. Takes about 30 minutes before I am chatting with someone. I give the rep the whole rundown...explain that I can see that both of my payments made it to the address. What can be done? "Your refund is being processed and will be available within 1-2 days". She also provides a link to the bitpay refund invoice... Still short more than half of my payment. I rexplain this concern..."you will have to contact bitpay". "Thank you for your time, have a nice day." I say.
Come to find out, bitpay has a support page where I can provide all the details of my issue...transaction I'd, wallet address, merchant, etc. Sweet, this might go smoothly. I submit all of the info and explain the ordeal. Submit.
Confirmation email. My help request had been received. Unfortunately due to the astronomical Bitcoin boom of recent, there are a shit ton of help cases that I just made the button of the list of. Great.
So here I am 2 days later and haven't heard a word from bitpay other than an automated response to my initial submission. I get it, I am in the software support business myself... Things take time and when it rains it pours. But damn, I really want to order that gear. Most of all, I am not super confident that I am going to recoup the second transaction. For some reason I just have a bad feeling about it. But I will keep my fingers crossed and wait and see.
Bitpay, if you are reading this, please send my refund to
33a1EdfmQub96YFgMq13cRihnK3idzr2bt