Last modified: 2011-01-13 18:19:58 UTC
Were seeing a disproportionate amount of donations from Canada failing AVS even though they should go through.
Most of the transactions that I've seen from the OTRS reports from Canadian users have indeed failed AVS. In fact, every one failed AVS for the 'street' field. After looking a little deeper into how AVS works with PayPal, if we have AVS enabled as a filter in our PayPal account (which we do), it is then up to the card issuing bank whether or not to support an AVS query - it has nothing to do with whether or not the person making the transaction is from the US or 'international'. It is also /very/ difficult to gauge whether or not we're seeing a disproportionate number of donations from Canada failing AVS compared to their US counterparts. There is a separate 'international AVS' filter which we do NOT use, but the name is a bit of a misnomer. Rather than do AVS for 'international' customers, it just determines whether or not a credit card was issued from a US bank. Now for some speculation: since /every/ one of the folks reporting to OTRS about these issues speculated themselves that the problem was due to the fact they couldn't select a Canadian province (which it absolutely is not), I suspect that they leapt to this conclusion rather than attempt to correct any other problems in the form. Of course, I can't be sure, but that's what I would do if I was in their shoes. If this is the case, than this is at least partly a design/user interface/experience issue. I am going to send our PayPal rep an email about this and see if he can shed any more light on what we're seeing and offer any suggestions of how to remedy this.
No meaningful response from the PayPal rep beyond what we already know. Kaldari put together a form that is being displayed to Canadian users for the time being. I took some time last Friday to come up with some numbers of how we're doing with the new form for Canada compared to how we were doing before. Raw stats before: http://pastie.org/private/s1d8mexdkggf7gt7ukio2q Raw stats after: http://pastie.org/private/ehzlweif7mc1pvyyhfmg Overall, it looks like the new form significantly reduced the # of AVS failures for Canadian users - down to the same level as the US transactions. That said, we saw a higher abandonment (where abandonment = the user never clicked 'submit' on the cc form) and higher denial rate for Canadian trxns with the new form, although the numbers are pretty close before and after, so perhaps it is not actually that significant given the sampling period. Note that sets of #s you might assume would add up to 100% might not - this is because each discrete value was averaged between three different logs.
This might be a separate issue but there is certainly a high rate of Canadian Amex donations that are getting denied. We've escalated this issue to paypal.
Looking over the last couple days of transactions I'm not sure if PayPal is consistently supporting Amex transactions in Canada and possibly elsewhere at all. We have an open email with PayPal support to get a final answer on what they actually support. Their docs are typically inconsistent so I'd rather hear directly from them to get a final answer on the issue.
After our specialized Canadian donation pages and removal of un supported payment methods we've seen a steady decline in denied transactions. Resolving.
