Have you seen an increase in declined online transactions? If yes, then chances are you’ve already been caught in the whole 3D secure issue.
And if you haven’t yet then get ready for it. Because unless you are 3D secure by March 14th you could get caught out big time with declined credit card orders … exactly what you don’t need for Mother’s Day.
You see our friends at FloristPro have given us the heads up that we really need to alert you all to the problem because quite simply too many florists haven’t done what they need to … and that is going to potentially cause some big heap problems.
We asked Tim Teasle, MD of Floristpro, to explain.
The online card payment community has been in turmoil over the past 12 months due to changes in security called 3d secure. However, whilst 3d secure has been around for a while it was recommended, not compulsory, that was until 14th January this year when the rules changed and as of 14th March a new version called 3ds v2 is becoming mandatory.
Now before explaining the repercussions of this let me briefly explain how online payments work.
You essentially have two parts, your merchant account and a payment gateway.
The payment gateway simply facilitates the transaction between a website and your merchant account.
Some suppliers bundle these into one offering such as Stripe and Paypal, where others allow you to have a merchant account with one company and the payment gateway with another.
In this second scenario you would have two separate invoices, one from each company.
What is 3d secure?
3d secure is a security process where the payment gateway verifies your customer against the customer’s bank prior to processing the card. You often see this in operation during online payments when you are asked for a password during the payment process.
While some gateways have had this in place for many years, Visa and Mastercard only began enforcing all online transactions to pass 3d secure in January.
Since then, we have been seeing a lot more declined cards, mostly due to customer errors which were previously allowed.
With 3ds in full swing these errors now cause a decline.
Examples are the card holder address or postcode not matching the ones registered to the card. These are valid declines and customers now have to be more accurate in the information they supply when transacting online.
However, from the14th March Visa and Mastercard will start enforcing the new 3ds2 version and that could cause you online transaction problems if your payment gateway is not ready.
What is 3ds v2?
3ds v2 is an extension of the original 3ds system being released to meet the new strong customer authentication compliance.
This improved version increases the user experience with something called frictionless flow that increases security and reduces the risk of fraud. Simply put, more checks are made against the customer which could include by fingerprint, the phone used if a mobile based transaction, or a 2nd level authentication code sent to your mobile device.
How does this affect you?
Visa and Mastercard are stating that 3ds v2 will come into force on March 14th. While some payment gateways have this facility already in place many are only just, or not yet, ready.
The risk is that more cards will be declined after this date until your online gateway is using 3ds v2.
Which banks and gateways are ready?
There are many payment gateways and we could not list them all here but what we do know is the following have already implemented 3ds v2 and as long as you are using their latest gateway version you should not be affected.
Stripe
Any gateway using Visa’s connect-e service
Braintree
Paypal
proPayments (floristPro’s gateway used on Payagroup and Cashflows accounts)
Elavon
Gateways we know have just or have yet to implement 3ds v2 include
PaymentSense
WorldPay
We received the new code from PaymentSense this week which requires some hefty code changes to implement and we are yet to receive the implementation for Worldpay.
Conclusion
What you need to do?
This article is really to ensure you are aware of what 3ds and 3ds v2 are, when the new version is becoming mandatory and alerting you to check your payment gateway provider is ready. Basically it needs to be done by March 14th to be sure it will work!
Your website provider should be able to help you … here at FloristPro we are dedicating the next three weeks to making sure all our florist sites are 3dv2 compliant ... but as a tip, and assuming your website can process through it, Stripe is very easy to sign up for and swap to if you need to switch over whilst your current provider catches up.
With thanks to Tim Teasle at FloristPro for quickly reacting to our request for an article!
