Payment gateway settings effect on overseas orders

[Dim Chandelier]

Overseas orders make up about 10% of our business.
It's a hassle to process and ship them. We also had to disable the AVS (address verification) feature in our payment gateway. With AVS enabled, buyers oversea were getting declined. But now I find out that non-verified transactions may be hit with a 1% fee.
I'll check this out with Authorize.net on Monday.
Does anyone have any thoughts on overseas orders?
Any experience you'd care to share?

Thanks,
D.C.

[HRoth]

I also use authorize.net and have the AVS system without using it to decline. I probably have about 10% international sales also, and the ones from Japan are some of my biggest individual sales, and repeat buyers too. What I have been doing is if I feel at all suspicious of the purchase (and that means they buy certain items that I have had more trouble with in terms of US customers or they use some idiotic screenname), then I ask them for the customer service number off the back of the card. Some people get mad at this, some never respond, and some just give me the info (and they get their order). I put it on my website that I will ask for this info on international orders, but most people never read that (or maybe they don't know English very well). I did start using authorize.net's fraud suite recently because I kept getting many fraudulent attempts from Indonesia, like 30 in a row, all coming from the same server, and that way you can block them and perhaps use it as a bargaining chip to get a better rate from your payment processor. Anyway, that is what I am going to try with mine.

The discount rate I pay on non-qualified is much higher than the qualified rate, but it is usually worth it to me. And I consider that more and more of my customers will be international as the world balance of power shifts.

[Corey Bryant]

You would need to contact your MAP - not the payment electronic gateway to determine whether or not the MAP charges you more for a non-AVS. Which is usually the case - but then it also depends on the issuing bank. For example, we have a client in Russia and AVS cannot be completed. We thought we would be charged the non-qual rate but we were charged the qualified rate.

Usually, the gateway will still attempt to do AVS even if you have the feature turned off not to decline the orders. This you will need to check with Authorizenet.com (who BTW are open on Sundays - they are closed for customer service 2 days a year).

-Corey

[Dim Chandelier]

You're right Corey. It's the Merchant Acct that will charge the extra fee. I haven't called them yet.
International orders have increased in the last six months mostly due to falling dollar. Too bad it's such an incredible pain to process them. We use
USPS/Endicia for shipping. All orders over $100.00 ship Global Express (averages about $28.00/order).
It's the quickest to process - no seperate customs form. No one is balking at the shipping costs.
Thanks for the comments.

[incrediBILL]

If the costs aren't too prohibitive (depends on the merchant acct provider) you could always get a second account just for international sales with AVS off and modify your software to specify a different merchant account for US sales vs INTL sales.

This would save you the 1% on all the domestic orders which is only worth it if you make a serious amount of sales like $100K/month domestic which would be $1k savings/month with such a simple change.