Apple Store Billing

I wanted my first post of 2021 to be a serious dissertation on dialysis or kidney transplant, but it’s going to be a complaint about how Apple does it’s billing. Oh well…

So, I purchased an Apple TV 4k during Black Friday weekend. The price was $199 for the 64GB version, but you get a $50 Apple gift card. When I placed the order, the sales tax was $11.55 so the total was $210.55. The order summary I saw online looked like this:

Very unclear what amount was going to be charged to my Apple credit card. $210.55 or $160.55? Then I get a notification on my phone that Apple charged $160.55. “Oh,” I thought, “Apple applied the reward gift card to the purchase. Cool.” I then forgot about this whole transaction.

Today, I get a notification that my billing statement is ready, and I took a look; usually I don’t look and let autopay take care of it. I saw the $160.55 charge, but a few days later, I see a $50 charge. I did not buy anything for $50 from Apple since then, and the Wallet app on my iPhone has no details. It took some digging but it turns out Apple billed me twice for the Apple TV order: $160.55 + $50.00 = $210.55. So they billed me for the discounted price, then charged me for a $50 gift card that was then sent to me, at a different email address (my fault). Why?! As a finance person in real life, I kind of know why. If they just deduct $50 from the price, Apple’s revenue decreases by $50. If they use this circuitous give card route, a portion of their customers won’t redeem or use up all the gift card balance, and Apple get to recoup some of the lost revenue. Kind of lame, but it’s standard gift card business practice.

Furthermore, I could not find an online statement of my Apple account. The best I could see is a list of purchases but no payment information. After digging through all sorts of links and pages, I found my account balance through the iTunes/Music app on my MacBook. Even then, it was hard to find. All it said was balance = $37.06. I had to guess that it was the $50 less an app I bought for $1.99, some in-game purchases for $7.96, and my monthly iCloud storage plan for $2.99. Ugh, very confusing and frustrating to track down transaction data from several places online. Did some engineer design their credit card user interface?