Turning Off AVS

During Credit Card processing, Theatre Manager sends the patrons primary address information as a part of authorization request. The Bank has the option of using this for an additional level of fraud detection/prevention. Address Verification (AVS) may cause some online card rejection if:

1. the patron uses a card with a different billing address than what they have put into their online account in TM -AND-
2. your online merchant account settings have been set to very strict

The payment could be rejected due to an AVS mismatch.

 

The Online Portal for your merchant account defines the AVS settings

As expected, the banks preference is to be super-tight with AVS rules, so they usually default your online account to reject any non-matching addresses. For online sales, you can't expect the patron to make the address exactly match the bank so we suggest:

• Logging on to your bank portal. For example, if you use:
  • Paymentech Orbital, log in to the Orbital Virtual Terminal that you use for managing end of day.
  • Moneris e-select plus has a gateway
  • as do all the other merchant providers.
• find the section in the authorization options and disable all address verification options - i.e. tell the bank to accept the card even with address mis-matches

When your account is set this way at the bank portal, if there is an AVS mismatch, the authorization will still go through. If the AVS does match, it just helps verify the patron.

Your merchant account support people are usually better able to help with settings and using your virtual terminal. We may be able to help find it for you, but since the banks own their software, we are not always 100% familiar with each banking interface.