Difficulties charging foreign cards

My US merchant account declines cards more than it should

[statguy]

We charge our client's credit cards with Authorize.net and EXS (we have been doing it for years). Things are working OK usually for US cards, but a lot of foreign cards are getting declined (UK, Ireland, Italy, etc.) This has gotten worse recently.

The cards in question are valid (we have been able to verify it with another processor that we use which is based in Europe).

Has anyone seen that happen? any ideas?

[akmac]

Yes, I changed merchant accounts because of this problem. Your other option is to call them and ask them to change their policy regarding international cards-good luck.

[HRoth]

You can change your settings on Authorizenet so that cards with no address match are not declined. Then the international cards will not be declined, but I then manually check over all the no address matches.

[statguy]

Thanks for the info... I already have the Authorize.net settings so that the address match is not required. And the strange thing is that some foreign cards go trhough just fine. It's something like 30 to 35% that get rejected.

Admittedly, in these 35% there are some normal declines, but some cards are good for sure (we have several instances of the owner paying with the card on another one of our sites which uses a European-based processor : that's how we know the card is valid)

Another mistery of the banking system I guess. I wish it were not so opaque, but I guess opacity is the way they justify the fees.

[HRoth]

Have you noticed that the declines were using a particular browser? Someone posted a little bit ago about authorizenet having problems with certain browsers and giving declines for them.

[statguy]

Well, no I have not looked at that. I will start logging the errors and it will be interesting to see if there is a correlation. I'll let everyone know. Thanks for the tip :-)