AVS, short for ‘Address Verification System’ is a simple verification tool businesses use, that verifies the billing address of the credit card. AVS can verify the billing ZIP code and \/ or the street address of the card. AVS currently is only available for cardholders in the US.<\/p>\n
When a business keys a credit card into their terminal vs. swiping it, their terminal prompts them for an address or zip code, and this is the AVS system. When a merchant uses a online payment gateway to key in transactions, the gateway processes with the AVS system as long as an address and ZIP code are entered along with the transaction information.<\/p>\n
AVS costs a little extra:<\/strong> Many business owners see this additional fee, and not knowing the effects of not using it, decide to not use it so that they can save this additional 5 cents. What they don’t know and may never realize is that if AVS is not used on a keyed transaction, that transaction will downgrade to non-qualified. A non-qualified transaction is the lowest qualification level for a transaction, and has a much higher processing rate than with a qualified or mid-qualified transaction. Retail businesses will automatically downgrade to mid-qualified when keying in transactions, but will also downgrade to non-qualified when AVS is not used.<\/p>\n How much does it cost?<\/strong> Use AVS!<\/strong> The $.05 is much cheaper than the additional processing fee you will pay for downgrading to non-qualified. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AVS, short for ‘Address Verification System’ is a simple verification tool businesses use, that verifies the billing address of the credit card. AVS can verify the billing ZIP code and \/ or the street address of the card. AVS currently is only available for cardholders in the US. When a business keys a credit card […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecommerce","category-merchantaccounts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":538,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merchantequip.com\/merchant-account-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNormally AVS has an additional fee with it when a transaction is processed using the AVS system. This fee is normally $.05 – $.07 per each AVS transaction, and is charged in addition to the standard transaction fee for processing the credit card. <\/p>\n
\nDepending on your merchant contract, a non-qualified transaction can cost as much as 2% and $.50 or more extra per transaction. What this can mean is that if you have a keyed merchant account setup at 2.3% with a transaction fee of $.25 per transaction, the downgrade to non-qualified can increase this to 4.3% and a $.75 transaction fee. Your costs to process the transaction nearly doubled, because of the desire to save a nickel. Not all merchant account downgrade fees are this bad, but they all are significantly more than the $.05 for keying in a transaction.<\/p>\n
\nFor keyed merchants, AVS is required and should be used on every transaction. In addition to your transactions being more expensive by not using AVS, AVS is a very good fraud prevention system. For retail merchants, enter your customers billing ZIP code when you have to key in that occasional transaction. <\/p>\n