Card Acceptance Best Practices Goal
The credit card companies and associations require that their cards are accepted according to a set of rules that each one of them publishes at least once per year. It is important for you understand what these rules are and implement them into your sales process to ensure that you:
a. Get the lowest possible processing rates.
b. Minimize fraudulent transactions.
c. Reduce chargebacks.

Website Requirements
Certain content or features should be clearly displayed on your website. These elements are intended to promote ease of use for your customers and reduce potential disputes and chargebacks.
a. Customer service contact information. Customer service telephone number as well as email address should be clearly displayed on every page of the website, on shipping materials and on monthly statements. If customers cannot contact you when they have a question, they will contact their card issuer which may result in a chargeback.

b. Policies. Return, refund, cancellation and delivery policies should be available to online customers through clearly visible links on your home page. You should also provide “clickthrough” confirmation for important elements of the policies to require customers to click on an “Accept” or “Agree” button to acknowledge that they understand and accept these policies.

c. Order and refund confirmations. Send email confirmations and summaries within one business day of processing orders and refunds. State time frames for refunds and indicate that a full billing cycle may be needed for the card issuer to apply the credit to the cardholder’s account.

Transaction Processing
The credit card companies and associations have established a range of fraud-prevention policies, guidelines and services. Implementing these tools and best practices will help protect you from fraudulent transactions and will reduce chargebacks.

a. Cardholder information. Get the cardholder’s name and address. If the shipping address differs from the billing address, follow-up with a phone call or an email to verify the order. Be sure to ask for a phone number in your order form.

b. Card information. Get the card number and type (most consumers don’t know that a card’s type can be determined by the card number), the card’s expiration date (make sure it is in the future) and the Card Verification Code – the 3-digit number, located on the back of each card (or the 4-digit number on the front for American Express cards). The Card Verification Code serves to ensure that the customer is in physical possession of the card.

c. Implement Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. Visa and MasterCard introduced these tools to help merchants fight fraud and reward merchants who use them with very strong representment rights in cases of chargebacks (more details about these two programs in Chapter XIV – Credit Card Authentication).

d. Always use AVS. The Address Verification Service (AVS) allows you to verify a cardholder’s billing address by comparing it to the one on file with the card issuer. The perpetrators of fraud often do not know the account’s correct billing address (more details in Chapter XII – Address Verification Service).

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