"Garbage IT" Warning: One DP of Alipay + CSR on 12306 With No Points on a 12,306 Purchase, but -3x on Refunds (Possibly Related to Using Up the $300 Travel Credit First via Grocery Purchases)

In my guide to using US credit cards with Alipay, I previously mentioned one use case: linking your CSR/CSP to Alipay and buying 12306 train tickets does not incur Taobao’s 3% fee, and the category can code as Travel, which can trigger the Chase CSR travel credit and also earn the CSR/CSP category bonus.

Recently, a WeChat reader, Tiandi Zhijian, shared a very unusual DP. Based on this data point, he used Alipay + CSR to buy tickets on 12306. The purchase earned no points at all, but the refund still deducted 3x UR normally, resulting in a clawback against him [his CSR travel credit, including grocery purchases, had already been fully used up].

If you really want to spend on 12306, using WeChat linked with CSR/CSP or Citi Primmer/Prestige can still get you the category bonus. Although there has recently been some chance of miscoding, even if it miscoded you would still get 1x rather than nothing. You can also use a first-year Discover/Discover Miles card; no matter how it codes, it is still 2x/3x.

Using foreign credit cards with Alipay has been pretty confusing lately. At first, a wide range of QR-code merchants worked and coded as grocery purchases, but later transactions started miscoding and some were no longer accepted at all. In addition, another reader reported that Ctrip points did not earn 3x; see this 101 news flash.

For these two DPs, KUKU guesses the issue may be related to Chase previously allowing grocery purchases to count toward the $300 travel credit during the pandemic. After the credit was fully used, travel purchases totaling less than $300 may then have run into problems with points posting. The reader’s specific situation was as follows:

Before Chase’s pandemic benefit, he had already used part of the CSR travel credit, about $50
After Chase introduced the pandemic benefit, he spent at grocery stores and used up the remaining travel credit, completing the full $300
After that, buggy IT code may have continued to mark subsequent travel purchases as “eligible for reimbursement,” causing no points to post, or if a charge only partially filled the $300, then points posted only on the amount above $300

It is very likely that Chase’s backend did not handle this properly. Readers in a similar situation may want to keep an eye on it as well. If this happens, you should probably be able to contact Chase and get the missing points adjusted manually.

Alipay + US Credit Cards + Risk Control System Overview [2020.7 Update: Alipay purchase categories have been changing frequently lately, so use caution!]