I'm in the EXACT same situation with Authorize.net. I spoke with them at length today and found out that my per-transaction fees will go up heavily if we do not capture the billing address.
...at the exact moment that Krileon was addressing the issue and explaining that the issue will be solved and a solution implemented soon. Sorry; hadn't had my coffee yet."Blah-blah-blah, whine-whine-whine."
Same issue we're having here...
Now I can't because the AVS and haven't been able to take a single Payment.
We definitely can't afford higher Auth.net charges either...
Really would like a fix for this .... even a simple field mapping to the billing information would be fine for us!
Post edited by: hmossessi, at: 2009/10/06 20:11
Dirtypants ---
What kind of price difference are we talking?
How much more are we going to pay more per transaction?
Each membership / subscription is $60 now... we currently pay normal Fees... what can we expect to see now?
If AVS is not used on a transaction, that transaction will downgrade to non-qualified. A non-qualified transaction is the lowest qualification level for a transaction, and has a much higher processing rate than with a qualified or mid-qualified transaction. Retail businesses will automatically downgrade to mid-qualified when keying in transactions, but will also downgrade to non-qualified when AVS is not used.
Depending on your merchant contract, a non-qualified transaction can cost as much as 2% and $.50 or more extra per transaction. What this can mean is that if you have a keyed merchant account setup at 2.3% with a transaction fee of $.25 per transaction, the downgrade to non-qualified can increase this to 4.3% and a $.75 transaction fee. Your costs to process the transaction nearly doubled. Not all merchant account downgrade fees are this bad, but they all are significant.
AVS stands for Address Verification System. An AVS check is a comparison of a street (mailing) address with a billing address. Verisign charges extra fees for AVS where Authorize.net does not. Since U.S.-based Internet transactions are required to use AVS this fee is unavoidable (and considering the rampant fraud scams out there you probably don't want to avoid AVS). For international transactions, AVS can be disabled - simply elect not to reject "Non-US Card Issuing Banks" and select "AVS is not supported." Finally, it is possible to disable AVS entirely if anti-fraud services and/ or CVN's (Card Verification Numbers - usually a three-digit number on the back of the card) are used instead. However - this may be a violation of your merchant account agreement, so be sure to verify this prior to disabling AVS.