In the past few years, the use of pre-paid or gift credit cards (stored-value cards with a Visa, MasterCard, Discover or American Express logo) has grown significantly in popularity. According to the third annual National Retail Federation (NRF) Gift Card Survey, conducted by BIGresearch, card sales will total $18.48 billion this holiday season, a 6.6 percent increase over 2004. The average consumer will spend $88.03 on gift cards or 15.6 percent of their holiday gift budget (http://www.nrf.com/content/default.asp?folder=press/release2005&file=giftcards1105.htm&bhcp=1).
With this kind of growth, there is no doubt that your merchants can greatly benefit from processing gift credit card transactions. However, since a gift credit card is not associated with the recipient's billing address at an issuing bank, gift credit card transactions may experience Address Verification Service (AVS) rejections.
AVS is a valuable fraud-prevention tool that allows your merchants to validate customer billing address information before accepting credit card transactions. However, to allow for the smooth processing of gift credit cards during increased holiday shopping, your merchants should take the following steps to verify, and if necessary, turn off the appropriate default AVS setting for their payment gateway account:
- Log into their Merchant Interface account
- Click Settings and Profile in the main menu
- Click Address Verification System (AVS) in the Security section
- Click to deselect the checkbox labeled Address information for cardholder is unavailable (U)
- Click Submit
The AVS settings are then updated to allow the processing of gift credit card purchases with unavailable address information. It is recommended that your merchants reinstate this setting shortly after the holiday season.
Your merchants' success is our priority, especially at this busy time. Good luck and happy holidays!
Sincerely,
Authorize.Net