I have had far better success using the prepaid Visa from Safeway, than the one I had from Wal-Mart. Few places took my prepaid Wal-mart card. Haven't had any problems at all with the Safeway one.

That is really silly on their part- turning away business. My guess is that they either have to pay a bigger commission on foreign cards or else they have to pay more to verify details of non-us cardholders. Do they accept other credit cards (MasterCard etc)?

Yuma Arizona???

A lot of stores don't accept ANY Amerucan Express cards, American or not. I think I heard that the fees for merchants were very high, or something similar , that merchants opted to not accept the cards. This could be the case at Joann's rather than your card being Canadian.

I used to live in Yuma when DH was stationed @ MCAS Yuma (Marine Corps Air Station). I've heard its grown a lot since 1979.
Sharon W.

Yes, Yuma Az. They do accept American Express in their store, I've used it no problem. Seems to be only on-line. I did e-mail them, no answer. Oh well the sale is over & I saved a bundle. LOL.

Definitely call American Express. I always had to call them when I was traveling outside the US to use my US issued card. It's one of the ways they minimize fraud. Pain in the neck but...

It's not really an Amex issue, rather a vendor policy that will be stopping the use of the card. As someone said, many vendors do not accept Amex. Just as some will not accept MC and yet might have Visa, etc.

So the issue is with Joanne's. If they choose to do their business that way, that's their choice.
Perhaps this is the first time you've run into this issue, though keep in mind, Joanne's is NOT the only one that will not accept Canadian cards for doing business in the USA. Just as the other poster mentioned their USA card not being accepted here in Canada.

From what I've been able to glean, it's mostly the CC Processor that's the problem. It's an extra feature, and not every credit card processor offers it. Moreover, it's something that processors can change - they can, midstream, decide not to provide that feature (which appears to be what happened with JA - I was told that they used to be able to do it.) So while it's not strictly Jo-Ann's fault - they didn't make the decision themselves out of spite or something - it is their fault in that they continue to use the same processor, when there are others they could choose to switch to instead.

IMHO it's not that JoAnne's wants to discourage business from Canadians, as much as it is that they want to minimize the risk of fraudulent transactions. With card-not-present transactions, such as mail order / phone order / online purchases, the risk of a customer using a stolen card is much higher than in person. Here's a link to read: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2216470,00.asp ... The rate of fraud on international transactions is apparently almost triple the rate for domestic sales.

What happens when there's a fraudulent transaction? As a merchant who has been stung this way several times, I can tell you... the cardholder wins, and the merchant loses. Not only does the merchant lose the merchandise, and the shipping cost, and the money, the merchant also has to pay a fee of $25 or so. If this happens too many times, the merchant's reputation with the bank gets damaged, and then the merchant has to pay a larger fee each time they process a credit card.

Apparently the owners of JoAnns have decided that the risk is not worth the reward. We can disagree, but as the business owners, it's really entirely their call.

In my store, we do sell internationally, but only to certain countries, and we fraud-screen all of our orders. One rule we do stand firm on is that a customer cannot order from country A, and ask for us to ship it to country B. The only exception we make is for Canadian or Mexican customers who want to ship to a border state; we understand that many people have mailboxes in border towns, and come across periodically to collect their mail and packages.

It's also worth mentioning that some card-issuing banks have rules set in place that do not allow for, say, a German credit card to be used outside of Europe. In this case, such a credit card purchase is declined by the card-issuing bank, and not by the merchant. So if anyone from outside the US is trying to make a purchase online with a card that they know is good, and has funds, they should call their card-issuing bank to see if they can correct the problem.