The shopping cart trick used to be a popular method to get store credit cards with no hard pull done on your credit report. This was mostly useful for people rebuilding their credit as it meant your credit wasn’t checked and you’d be approved in most cases. In late 2018/early 2019 reports started coming in that hard pulls were being done and approvals were much more difficult to come by.
Since then we’ve started seeing reports again of no hard pulls being done. There is a regularly updated post on myFICO forums asking for datapoints on whether a hard or soft pull was done. After reading through that post it seems that sometimes no hard pull is being done but it’s not consistent at all and even on the same card/brand sometimes a hard pull is done and sometimes it isn’t done. I haven’t been able to find any reason as to why a hard pull is sometimes done and why sometimes only a soft pull is done. If anybody cracks the code or has a theory on why I’d love I hear it in the comments below.
I feel like it has to do with the terms before you click agree when apping. In fairly bold lettering it states something along the lines of legally required to pull CRs for apps in certain states (only noticed because one was a state I work in, but my perm residence state is not that one, thankfully). I didn’t take a SS because I figured it was common knowledge, but I remember NY, RI, and VT….there may be others. I’d be curious on DPs for that. May not be it, but sure could! I just got the VS card 2/2020 via SCT with only SP and 1k SL with low scores. So I don’t think it is totally dead, I think they legally got restricted because they were giving them out too easy and prob showed up too often in BKs…
Maybe it has something to do with the cart contents. Some items associated with fraud or things like that might trigger a review, and other innocuous items might just be waved through.
Maybe