This is a really good story to highlight how good credit cards are for this situation. It’s totally reasonable for a vendor to freeze shipping via credit card purchase until they’ve received confirmation they will be paid. Basically modern escrow. Sorry you seem to have been caught up in a rare edge case, I’ve been in the same situation, but am super happy that the system makes 99% of payments totally frictionless unless occasionally I’m traveling abroad (or ordering abroad) and they have additional checks.

Long live the virtues of credit card payments!