Why was my payment not accepted?

FYI, the Place Order button might be entirely disabled ("greyed-out") if the "My billing and shipping address are the same" box is unchecked and a different billing address was entered, but the address Update button immediately below and to the right of the billing address block was not clicked. Otherwise...

If your card issuer or your bank declines to authorize payment, a  pink banner  containing an advisory will briefly appear near the top of the page. Sometimes further explanation is provided by your card issuer or your bank, but might be ambiguous to protect your privacy. A " Processor Declined", "Suspected Fraud", "Do Not Honor", "Restricted", "Cannot Authorize at this time (Policy)", "Not Allowed", or "Call Issuer" response from the card processor when attempting to place an order is usually for security or funding reasons. Do not retry with the same card; you must call the phone number on the back of your card to inquire further.

IMPORTANT: Your order has been accepted only when you Place Order and immediately see a "Thank You" page with your Order Number. Do NOT keep unsuccessfully attempting to Place Order until you have you have identified and corrected the cause of the payment not being accepted. Several rapidly repeated unsuccessful payment attempts will trigger a lockout, then even valid payments for the order will be gateway rejected as "Risk Threshold Exceeded". If that happens you will have to wait a few minutes before making another payment attempt.

Checkout with a different payment method will often work around these issues. When using a different payment method or after talking to your card issuer, please restart from the beginning by returning to Proceed to Checkout.


If your card is being rejected by our payment gateway, there are several possibilities:

  1. The card number, expiration date and the card verification value ( CVV aka security code ) entered must be the current and correct numbers on the card you are using. Verify the details and then restart checkout from the beginning with the correct card information.
  2. If you are using a stored card and for any reason the card was reissued after being stored, then you cannot checkout with a stored card that has been reissued. Instead restart checkout from the beginning and manually enter the new card information.
  3. The billing or ship-to address may contain a typographical error causing the information to be unrecognizable such as missing, misspelled or mismatched phone number, city, state or region, postcode, or country. Verify their details, then restart checkout from the beginning with the correct information.
  4. A third party SHIPPING ADDRESS for the order may be associated with a recent history of chargeback or fraudulent transactions such as an forwarding agent or mail drop, hotel or business, or multi-unit residential building. Restart checkout from the beginning using a different shipping address to work around these issues.
  5. The INTERNET ACCESS used to enter the order may be associated with a recent history of fraudulent transactions such as an enterprise network firewall, Airbnb, public Wi-Fi hotspot, public VPN, or in rare circumstances your device security may be compromised. Restart checkout from the beginning using a different internet access or payment method to work around these issues.

Other Causes of Checkout or Website Problems

The Dive Gear Express checkout flow, together with our next generation payment gateway to your card issuer or bank, support a wide variety of ecommerce industry best practices to help protect your privacy, your order and your payment credentials from theft or fraud. In rare cases, one or more of these protections may prevent you from successfully placing an order:

  • You may not see shipping and/or card payment options at all if you are visiting our site through an application firewall (such as those found in enterprise, government, and military grade networks) that is configured to block certain types of javascripts. NoScript is a popular browser extension also causing this issue. Such measures are unnecessary in this case because our website provides a Content Security Policy (CSP) that your browser will automatically use to block unauthorized scripts. Our checkout flow requires CSP trusted scripts loaded by your browser directly from the shipping quote and payment gateway servers. Contact your network administrator for advice.
  • Our website may be unusually slow or you may be unable to place an order if you are visiting our site though an open proxy which exposes your payment information. In particular, do not use public VPN provider services, network overlay services, or anonymous browsers that might intercept your information under the guise of enhancing security. We must be able to establish trusted end-to-end encrypted connections directly between your web browser and our servers.
  • You may be unable to place an order using payment options protected with ReCaptcha V3 security (validation error: score-threshold-not-met) if the checkout information was automatically entered by "cut-and-paste" or your browser "auto-fill", instead try manually typing the information. ReCaptcha scores can sometimes be improved by first signing-in to a browser personal profile, then returning to the shopping cart and Proceed to Checkout.

Checkout with a different browser or device connected via a different network will often work around these issues.


If you are still having problems, please Contact Us.