Mine hasn't failed yet, but I am fully expecting it to do so. The amount is outside my normal spending pattern. I rang Nokia and my bank this morning to see what could be done. The guy at Nokia said that he was aware that their system cancels an order when a cc company asks for further information, and that this was not normal for online retailers. I mentioned that Amazon attempt to contact the buyer and get them to authorise the transaction over the phone, and he said that the fact that they didn't was 'just part of our ordering system'. He suggested that I ring the fraud department at my bank, as Nokia's system showed the order to be 'pending'.

My bank were very helpful, but could not see the transaction as either having happened or in ear-marked funds. They can't do anything until they actually have the transaction request, and by then (it seems) Nokia will likely have failed and cancelled the order. The woman I spoke to said that 'Nokia are not following the correct procedure' by bailing on orders at the first hurdle, and I got the impression that she was referring to some kind of code of practice (formal or informal) that was established between payment processing agencies and retailers. I guess that - in the usual run of things - retailers are keen to actually get the money, and so will pause the order and deal with it again when the buyer has contacted their payment provider.

So for me the lesson here is that Nokia UK is not that desperate to have me as a customer. It makes sense in a way, as whomever I buy from will have to get the phone from them, so there's no real motivation to compete with the customer-friendly payment practices of other online retailers.

Oh, and the Nokia rep told me that if I did have to reorder because this transaction failed, it would only take 'one or two days' to get my order processed. I asked him if they had enough stock to make that kind of promise and he said that he was sure they did. I would not, however, get my discount, as 'there are no discount codes available at the moment' (whatever that meant). Of course, I would be extremely unlikely to reorder from Nokia simply because the same thing would almost certainly happen again (fail-cancel-grrr etc).

It seems to me that Nokia UK's payment processing system for online orders is fairly untypical, and - according to my bank at least - incorrect. This incorrectness is leading to many customers losing discounts for which they originally qualified. I think that consumer interest organisations and media programmes would probably be fairly interested in this.