Card Questions

Credit, debit and payment cards and questions

General information : In common with most online shops we use a payment gateway. This is a fully secure link between our website, your bank and our bank. Our gateway with SagePay is a state-of-the-art, secure system. Sagepay is the largest independent Payment Service Provider in the UK and is approved by all major UK banks and card issuers.

For your security, Sagepay check the card holder, address, house number, postcode, card security number and other details before validating your card with your bank who then authorise payment. This is to prevent fraudulent use of your card details.

We are also members of the MasterCard SecureCode and Verified by Visa schemes. This is to further protect you against someone trying to use your card details to make fraudulent purchases. If you decline to use these schemes however, your bank may refuse payment to us.

Cards accepted

MasterCard, Visa, Visa Delta/Debit, Maestro (including International Maestro).

Additionally we also accept the following, online only : American Express, PayPal

When am I charged ?

You make payment when you go through checkout to SagePay and you press “pay now” after you enter your details.

Payment is made by yourself at the time. We do not take payment, we cannot defer or take payment later for online orders as we never see your card details.

If you do not wish to pay when an order is placed, then please order later, or choose the option to pay another way.

Who sees my card details?

For online orders, we do not see any of your card details at any time.

Payment is made by yourself from your card, through the secure Sagepay gateway (Sage establishes a connection to your bank, they deal with the card details).

We do not see ANY card details at any time. We cannot access your card details. We cannot use them make additions to an order and additions to orders  are no longer available. These caused us headaches and despatch delays as well as a hugely disproportionate amount of paperwork. To compensate, we have reduced our postal rates on small orders (such as one or two plants) to the bare minimum, so that extra orders are not punitive.

Payment problems

These are rare but can happen with some issuing banks. This is beyond our control.

● Some banks, especially in the USA routinely refuse payments to other countries, as a security measure. This is beyond our control. You will need to contact your card issuer to authorise your card for overseas transactions if this happens.

● Careless entry of your details will cause payment to fail. Wrongly entering a card number, expiry date, valid-from date or security number (from the back) can cause failure. Guessing expiry dates or security numbers will also lead to failure when wrong data is entered.

● Postcodes can be a problem. Even slightly inaccurate postcodes can cause failure. Putting your city or country into the postcode field will confuse most bank computers which respond by declining payment.

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