Do US banks decline foreign online credit card transactions at a higher rate?
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Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
06 July 2011 00:30am
Hi,
Most of our customers are in the US and the decline rate we're getting is very high, around the 20% mark.
We're based in Australia and use a (reputable) local gateway to process transactions.
We then manually process declined transactions using a US based gateway and these tend to go through.
Our local gateway are saying that US banks are feeding back fairly generic reasons for the declines. Nothing to indicate that there may be a problem with the local gateway.
I'm just wondering whether US banks are perhaps overly cautious as far as non-US transactions and suspect that the solution will have to be to channel US based clients through a US based gateway.
Any other ideas?
Thanks.
Lawrence
CEO at Econsultancy
18 July 2011 21:36pm
Hi Lawrence
Are you sure it's your payment gateway that's rejecting the transactions or your acquiring bank?
We've had a similar experience. We use Datacash as our payment gateway but all they do is present transactions to our acquiring bank (Barclays) to authorise or not. And we've had problems with authorisations in countries which Barclays no doubt deems 'dodgy'. For example, we had real problems getting any transactions from India approved. So we worked around this by providing PayPal as a payment method for Indian customers.
So is your acquiring bank in Australia? Might they be rejecting a lot of the US transactions? I'm not sure it is the gateway.
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
20 July 2011 06:51am
Hi Ashley,
I managed to get some more info by asking around and looking at the long list of declined transactions.
It seems that in most cases (US issued) credit cards that are declined are company cards, so I'm thinking that these have specific restrictions relating to purchasing items outside the US.
I'll get in touch with some of the declining banks to try and get a sense of whether restrictions are in place.
Cheers,
Lawrence
07 September 2011 10:00am
Probably to late to contribute much but..... Our ecommerce platform integrates with several gateways like Realex and SagePay and from our experience if the transactions been cancelled or declined it's a result of the gatewas who check bad card numbers, invalid numbers, expired cards, funds available etc and then after qualification the transaction is presented to the bank for settlement. Interesting to see the difference in experience between us here.
Also, wondering how you got an amercian gateway to work with an Autralian acquirer. I thought you needed a US address and Social Security number to use an American gatway?