Credit Cards Online Information

ClearCommerce, the leading provider of fraud prevention and payment processing solutions, today issued a merchant advisory encouraging retailers to closely review Address Verification System (AVS) rules used to process online orders.

Use of 'gift' credit cards (from American Express, MasterCard and VISA) has caused many valid online transactions to be rejected because of commonly enforced AVS anti-fraud rules.

To help reduce fraudulent online orders, AVS verification checks portions of the billing street address and zip code and match them to the address on record for the credit card. Individual retailers determine their specific responses based on the AVS result; for instance if the order is for more than $100 and AVS fails, then the order is automatically rejected.

Because 'gift' credit cards are not issued to a specific consumer, these cards typically do not have a billing address tied to the card. In these cases most of the financial institutions issuing branded gift cards return special codes indicating that the address could not be validated; however, some online merchants have programmed their systems to simply reject transactions that do not obtain a full match AVS response.

With an expected spike in post-holiday online purchases using 'gift' credit cards, all merchants should carefully review AVS rules and policy. Suggestions include:

--Carefully expanding AVS rule sets to include the responses that would be obtained for 'gift' credit card.

--Educating internal review teams to spot gift credit card orders that are most likely valid, but might have been marked otherwise.

Merchants can also call the ClearCommerce Merchant Holiday Hotline at 866-497-0343 for more information on the special AVS response codes.

Consumer Tip:

Consumers may receive messages that their orders have been declined when using gift cards. Should this happen, the best course of action is to simply call the merchant and place the order with a representative. Chances are the gift credit card, and the gift givers' intentions are still good!