Many declined cards with AVS = U

Anybody else seeing this all of a sudden?

[Tonearm]

Right after Christmas I started getting many more declined cards than usual. Most of them return an AVS response of U, which I think means unavailable, and I think usually means an international card, or maybe it means a gift card? I know customers have used gift cards on my site in the past.

[Realbrisk]

After Christmas definitely Gift cards

[Tonearm]

Does anyone know if gift card acceptance can be disabled?

[Brett_Tabke]

>Does anyone know if gift card acceptance can be disabled?

No, they areally are treated like a credit card. However, the receipient is often at a loss as to know what to put in for address and avs.

[Tonearm]

Thank you, I guess they're being declined so often because people can't stay on top of their balance. Who could? I really can't stand those things.

[Realbrisk]

<>I guess they're being declined so often because people can't stay on top of their balance.... </>

if its being declined due to the balance then you would get Auth#000000 or declined with no reason

[Tonearm]

Realbrisk, do you usually get specific info as to why a card was declined? I think it just tells me it was declined.

[rocknbil]

It depends on your processor, and what actual values are returned, but most of them return codes for various transaction attributes that are mapped to real text explanations of the reasons for decline.

For example, U means unavailable (I think) on the AVS, meaning, the address verification could not be done because the address is invalid, not in their database, etc. Basically, it could be anything, but the bottom line, they attempted to retrieve the address info and could not. Which has nothing to do with the status of the account.

I'll say too, note that declined and transaction failed are two different things; decline can cause it to fail, but AVS can only cause it to fail if you require AVS on all transactions in your merchant account gateway.

We perform AVS, but have our merchant gateway account(s) set up not to decline on AVS failure. That info is returned to our site and the programming acts on it, but doesn't fail the trans. We manually review it.

[Realbrisk]

General AVS Responses
[cms.paypal.com...]

below is a message we have received from authorize.net

To avoid errors when accepting gift cards (stored-value cards with a Visa, MasterCard, Discover or American Express logo), you will want to uncheck the U response code. For this type of transaction, the customer's billing address will most likely not be associated with the gift card, or will not be on file at the issuing bank.

[Tonearm]

Thanks guys. I see that Authorize.net actually gives you pretty fine-grained control over AVS responses and whether or not you want the transaction to be declined. I don't have "U" checked, but I'm getting a lot of declined cards with an AVS "U" response. Is anyone else?