I was just posting about this in another topic, and I’m hoping this is the right place to report the issue. It may have already been reported, but if not, I’d like to make sure it gets to the right team.
Some merchants that are clearly recurring subscription services are still being classified as regular one-time purchases instead of recurring payments. For example, I’ve attached a screenshot of my OpenAI / ChatGPT charge. This is a recurring subscription, but it is currently being treated as a regular purchase and only earning 1% cashback instead of the 4% recurring-payment cashback rate.
It would be great if this could be reviewed and corrected so that ChatGPT—and potentially other similar subscription services—are properly recognized as recurring transactions going forward.
I’m also not sure whether support can manually adjust the cashback for previous charges as a one-time courtesy, but ideally the merchant classification itself could be fixed so future recurring charges automatically receive the correct cashback rate.
There’s a pretty long thread on this here, which I think includes this situation. As a quick summary:
There’s basically two ways companies can do recurring cashback: either looking for a recurring yes/no “flag” on each transaction or selecting specific merchant codes that are generally recurring (“telecom”, “digital subscriptions”).
We starting with the flag system, which sounded like the best option, except transactions were marked incredible inconsistency. Utilities, for example, were only including the flag in ~60% of transactions. Worse, the same utility would send the flag one month, but not the next.
We switched to the MCC code system, which is what the rest of the card uses. This means that “utilities” will always be categorized the same way each month. It also means that some categories of purchases that are recurring will fall outside the codes that we ended up including. ChatGPT, I suspect, bills as a business tool or something, like Quickbooks, and will not earn recurring rewards.
