***Good application service ***
I applied for a Barclaycard Initial credit card online as my first credit card about four months ago. I had never had a card and assumed I would have a low credit rating and had read that this was a good card to apply for to boost your rating. The application went through fine and I was offered a Barclaycard Gold rather than an Initial card which had better offers on it.

***Pushy sales staff***
I initially used the card for regular spending, paying off the full amount every month but then started to get calls from Barclays about transferring a balance to the card. The sales people were very pushy but as I had been using my card and still had to make that month's payment I did not agree to the transfer as I knew that any repayments would go to my transfer balance first, leaving interests on my purchases accruing.

However, the offer was tempting - 9 month interest free on a balance (better than the advertised rate for Gold cards with a fairly competitive fee of 2.5%) so I decided to pay Barclays the cost of all the outstanding purchases I had made up to that point and then accept the deal. I sent Barclays a payment for all my purchases up to date (naively failing to realise that I could only do so for those in my most recent statement). I then talked to customer services who were very pushy again and I agreed to transfer a balance of about £1800 to my card.

I found out the following month that one of my purchases for £35 had just gone into the following statement period, so my card was treated as £35 in credit,with the sum of £35 still outstanding for the following period. Now that I had transferred the £1800 balance any repayments would repay that balance first and interest would accrue on the £35 purchase at about £1 a month. This would have been obvious to whoever I spoke to on the phone and I think it was very cheeky of them to try to catch me out, twice!..

***complaint***
If you're still following this...
I complained to Barclaycard about the way I had been treated. This time the guy I spoke to was very helpful, agreed that it had been cheeky of staff to push me and offered me a £15 credit, which since I was planning to repay the balance within six months left me £9 better off overall.

***Complicated story aside***
I own a number of credit cards now and find that Barclays statements are the clearest. Although I think it was very cheeky of staff to try and catch me out, I only picked up on the issue because the statement had a clear bold section which read "Estimated interest next month". I haven't seen this on any of the other credit cards I or my husband have owned (Tesco and Abbey).