AVS Check at checkout?

[atdbuzr]

Hi all,

I'm wondering what your opinions are on having the realtime AVS feedback at checkout time. This means that if a customer enters in an incorrect billing address, they get an error during checkout. Right now we don't stop customers from completing their order if it fails AVS. The thought is that we are minimizing the number of abandoned carts, but I was wondering what everyone thought about the subject?

thanks,
-Jeff

[stymiee]

I would recommend against it. It's not a great fraud prevention tool by itself. It is meant to be used as part of a larger fraud prevention plan which includes CVV amongst other things. Plus it is too easy, and too common, for users to enter the wrong billing address for their credit card. They may enter a shipping address or may use a PO Box for their mail which will cause AVS to fail. You would lose too many legitimate sales as a result.

[Corey Bryant]

It's an archaic method but still should be considered. If the AVS does not match, consider doing a little more scrubbing on the transaction.

AVS usually only checks the numbers, so it is very easy to mis-match those. I accidentally typed in the wrong ZIP code last weekend on a download. The transaction failed, so of course I re-ran it and just used the auto-fill in. And the transaction failed again. Third time, I realized what had happened. But before the company approved the transaction, they called me to verify the transaction.