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Gary D.: Dear Dr. Clyde A. Lettsome, we use PayPal for our online orders, but many times the order will not be processed and we have to then manually process the debit/credit card through our Bank ** ******* card terminal. Is their a debit/credit card processing company that can handle all of our online orders – including billing address mismatches? |
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Answer: Visa and MasterCard process payments between the card issuing banks of consumers and the banks of merchants. Part of MasterCards’ and Visa’s service (not a bank or organization) is to perform address verification (AVS) for keyed (non card swiped) transactions in an effort to prevent fraud.
Paypal devised a system similar to the Visa and MasterCard networks. Instead of processing payments between banks, they initially process payments between Paypal accounts. Because of a growing online Ebay market they offered Ebay and other merchants the ability to accept credit card payment online. Similar to the AVS system, I BELIEVE the Paypal computer system uses stored addresses (in Paypal accounts and possibly from prior orders via Paypal) and billing address (when purchasing) to flag possible fraud when addresses do not match for a specific card. This may be the reason cards work with other merchant account services and not Paypal. Because online merchant account processing services usually are not structured like Paypal, just about any other online merchant account service should work. This is because most, if not all, others depend on the MasterCard and Visa networks to perform verification when a card is keyed in online. Good luck! |
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