We get about 2 calls a day from an angry/confused customer that complains that we have charged their card more than once. We go to the admin panell and we see that they have 2 or more unfinalyzed orders. We tell them that the issuing bank does not know that the order was declined due to AVS mismatch and they put an hold on the funds and these charges will disappear in 2-3 business days.

I do not like to answer these calls, they are anoying and damaging our reputation!

I would like to know from other merchants and from Julie if this is standard in the industry or something is wrong with our Merchant Bank System? How do you deal with these calls?

We us authorize.net as payment gateway. I saw them at the Internet Retailer Show and I was told by one of their technical reps that my merchant bank should support "AVS Declines Automatic Reversals" I called my merchant rep and after investigating this he replied that the Authorize.net rep did not know what she was talking about???

Where is the truth?

Any help on this subject will be appreciated

Nuriel

If only these things were easy... an authorization is done whenever someone presses the Order button on your store. Since you have told Authorize.net or not to allow orders where the AVS does not match, the customer re-enters their information and submits the order again, thereby causing multiple authorizations.

In the past, there was no electronic way to void an authorization once it had been issued; you could call up the issuing bank on the phone and ask them to void the authorization, but there wasn't anything that could be done electronically... most people just waited. Recently, the platforms have started adding 'Authorization Reversals' - basically, the ability to electronically void an authorization.

As far as I can tell on Authorize.net's website/documentation/API/etc, they do not yet support auth reversals. CyberSource (which now owns them) has their own gateway, which does support authorization reversals - you might have been speaking with someone at IRCE that knows CyberSource has the function, but may not realize Authorize.net doesn't yet (as far as I can tell)... CyberSource has quite a bit of information about it here:

http://apps.cybersource.com/library/docume...ntro_5525_70633

So, not only does it matter which online gateway you use (Authorize.net, CyberSource, etc), it also matters what platform that gateway is running on (Vital/TSys, Nashville, etc)...

So - how does everyone else deal with this problem? Some shopping carts start by authorizing a small amount (like $1) to test the AVS, and once they have a good AVS perform the final authorization for the value of the order... that would solve this problem... but, as far as I know, if you want to decline bad AVS orders, there isn't currently a solution for you...

Hope that helps... explain it at least...