Discover Card is one of the most popular brands of credit cards which were issued in United States. The Discover Card was basically brought into market by SEARS which was the biggest trader company in United States and they also bought brokerage and real estate companies. The Discover brand remained part of Dean Witter and after this Morgan Stanley till 2007. After that discover financial services became an autonomous company. Initially the discover cards used to have a little stamped symbol which represented Sear Towers of Sear Financial network. Mostly Discover bank issues all of the cards with this brand. The transactions are mainly done through the payment net work of Discover brand. This company started issuing debit cards in February 2006 which was possible by Pulse payment system.

If we go through the Discover card brand acceptance than we will see that this brand has more than 50 million card members and over 4 million traders and locations to get cash. Also in more than 4500 banks automatic teller machine, shortly called ATM, is available to get cash instantly. But if we compare Discover with its competitors than we will come to know that it is neither acknowledged in US nor used out side the United States.

An extra benefit of Discover Card is that they provide the facility of debit payoff at any shop of Sears. Discover brand cards are just acknowledged only in some places like cars renting areas and some American agencies and business catering areas. ATM service by Discover is also not available in Canada yet. Some portion of business areas in Canada do accept and use this brand of cards for their transactions.

Discover issues different types of cards for its customers like platinum cards, Gas cards, Miles cards, Student cards. In all of these four Discover cards similarities are greater than differences. Along with above four cards Discover also issues Master cards using network of Goldfish in UK.

Discover doesn’t cost annual fee for their card holders. They also facilitate by fraud alerts, cash back bonuses. No interest is charged for the introductory period of the customer. There is no member ship and card charges for Discover users. Credit limit of five hundred thousand dollars is provided, a five percent cost of fuel and maintenance is paid by the gas cards and also one percent of payments offered if customer buys an automobile with the card. They also offer student cards which are useful for people who have limited resources.

Along with the plus points of Discover cards there are many problems which this brand creates for its card holders. Like in the end of year 2007 they started increasing the rate of interest on the customers who have their account for a long duration. The basic increasing rate was 14.74 and later it was raised to 22.99% on annual basis. The basic flaw of the Discover APR is the double cycle of billing in which the cardholder has to pay more interest than he consumes the card. This increase in interest was based on different reasons like if the account is open for more than one year. Secondly if the account is not in use for many months and many other reasons were given to the customers who inquired about this step.

As it is known to every one that with credit card we have to pay the interest for cash drawl and if we talk about Discover than we will see that they cost more interest (19.99%) on platinum cards which helps you out to lose money in short duration. They also charge three percent fee on every transaction of least $5 and now we can judge how much fee will be cost at maximum amount of transaction. This causes a lot of tension for their card holders. In this way Discover card reversed the conventional brand loyalty to its long term users and most of their customers cancelled their accounts due to such steps.

Discover customers have to face is inefficient online system of Discover. The logging to the personal account is very problematic. User have to insert the account number four times in forms of four sets every time he wants to log in even user can not select the account name at his own will like other banks do.