Accepting ways of Validating Cards

or Authenticating the card holder

[ideavirus]

Hi,

In order to reduce support costs and also increase customer retention what are the acceptable ways of validating cards online when integrated with a payment processor. Some of them could be like;

1. to do a “$0” transaction, which is interpreted as an authorization request and won’t appear on the customer’s bill, or need to be reverted
2. another is to use a specific API to validate the credit card
3. the last one is to revert/cancel the $1 authorization after it has been done. This may not be the best solution because it might end up showing on buyer monthly statement which merchant has no control over.

What are the other possible ways?
What if the integrated payment processor does not offer better ways of validating? Is there anything a merchant can do?

Thanks much for sharing your thoughts and any experiences.

[enigma1]

Another way is to validate where the customer comes from. For instance his IP could be used to verify certain things, say if you see someone behind a proxy placing an order it may imply foul play. Or if the IP belongs to country A but he ships to country B could be a red flag in which case you don't even need to worry about the payment processor.

[ideavirus]

enigma1 - thanks.
Your suggestion is more of doing some validation by the merchant without having to do any handshake with the payment processor. But I was looking for ways to do validation with an handshake to payment processor.

Thanks much

[piatkow]

I might be missing something here but I thought this was what Verified by Visa / Mastercard SecureCode would cover.

[ideavirus]

I mean what if VbV or MSC is not a must for some international countries... i was exploring alternative options.

Thanks much for any help again.