bybit card works online at Apple every time and declines at the retail till every time

Odd failure pattern on the Bybit card and I want to know whether it is mine or general before I write it up.

Where	Attempts	Approved
Apple online, card in Apple Pay	6	6
App Store, stored card	4	4
Apple retail store, contactless	5	0

Same card, same week, same phone. It provisions into Apple Pay without complaint and it works everywhere online. Standing at the till in an actual Apple store it declines five times out of five, and the staff terminal shows a generic decline.

Balance was well above the amount every time. Anyone reproduce this, or is something specific to my account going on?

where is your balance sitting. trading account or funding

Some of both. I would have to check the split on each of those days.

It is offline authorisation. Retail terminals under a floor limit approve locally without going to the issuer, and a card that settles against an exchange balance at authorisation time has nothing to answer with. Online always goes online, so online always works.

five for five at apple, on amounts nobody is floor limiting. that is not offline

Contactless has its own limits and they are not the same as chip and pin. It fits.

The balance location is the thing to rule out first and it is easy to test.

This card spends directly from the exchange balance rather than from a topped-up card balance, which is the whole appeal of it — no separate top-up step. What that means in practice is that the authorisation has to resolve against a specific account at the moment of the swipe, and funds sitting in the trading account are not available to it. Online purchases often give you enough time for a conversion to complete; a contactless tap does not.

Move everything you intend to spend into the funding account, leave it there overnight, and repeat the retail test. If it approves, that is the answer and it is not the terminal.

Worth adding that in-store is also where the cashback tiering bites — the 10% headline needs VIP volume and balance that most people reading this do not have, so if you are choosing this card for a rewards reason you are probably looking at 2 to 5%.

Tested properly. Six days, everything in funding, nothing in trading.

Where	Attempts	Approved
Apple retail, contactless	7	7
Apple retail, chip	2	2
Apple online	3	3

So it was the balance location, not offline authorisation. Every one of the original five declines lines up with a day where the majority of the balance was in the trading account and the funding account was under the purchase amount.

Calling this answered. If your Bybit card declines in person and works online, check where the money is before you check anything else.

Seven for seven changes my mind on your five. I still think there is an offline case in here somewhere but it is not this one.

This is what a useful thread looks like. Claim, disagreement, test, number.

More of this and fewer people posting adjectives.