Unreliable. Lackluster support

Yesterday I paid online using Payfast/Credit Card to top up my "Smart Fund" facility to buy electricity, which I urgently needed to buy last night. A day later I still have not received anything at all and have not received any feedback as to when I will receive my credit or why I have not received it yet. The response from support is just that that they haven't received a payment and cant do anything else. This is absolutely unacceptable because they could simply login to their PayFast account account and verify that they've successfully received a payment and manually allocate it in less than 5 minutes.

I have been running e-commerce businesses myself for over 20 years and have processed millions of dollars of transactions over the years and a delayed payment is usually always one of the following things:

1) A payment needs a manual review for *****, verification, etc.

In this case the payment should only be "authorized" and not "captured" until the transaction has been cleared. The user should be informed that the transaction is delayed and given an option to immediately void and cancel the transaction if they aren't willing to wait so that they can immediately receive their funds back and make alternative plans. Competent companies such as Uber, Amazon, etc all employ a similar process and it's why you'll rarely ever see their customers ever complaining that their money is essentially being held ransom or having to wait for a refund. It should also be unlikely that my payment was flagged given that this payment was only for R85 and I've spent tens of thousands over the years using this service.

2) A technical fault prevented the website from receiving the payment provider.

It's possible sometimes that the webserver, database, network, etc could experience intermittent connectivity issues and in this case their payment provider should be setup to keep retrying failed payments. There should also be an automated process that reconsiles payments and will flag a human for any discrepancies within say an hour.

With that said, I would recommend everyone avoid this company, especially if you are in immediate need of your electricity tokens, vouchers, etc.