Protx - Problems with Authenticate / Authorise?

[little-linguist]

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone else who uses the Protx new authenticate and authorise system is having problems with not being able to bill cards?

We used to use preauth and repeat and recently switched over to the new "Authenticate and Authorise". There has been a huge increase in transactions being declined when we've tried to bill cards before shipping orders (about 30% of all orders). The transactions are often declined by the bank but when we call the customers to take payment over the phone, they give the same card details (they say) and it goes through fine (using Protx's VSP terminal). The cards are passing the new 3D secure thingy.

I've emailed Protx support to see what's going on as it's taking up a huge amount of time having to call customers to manually collect payment info before shipping. I'm quite sure it's a Protx and not a Bluepark issue as I've tried manually authorising the transactions in Protx admin console and they're still failing.

Just wondering if others are experiencing the same?

[Chris]

Hi there,

We switched to using Authenticate & Authorise also once it was launched and we too have had similar problems.

I've had extensive email conversations with Protx support about it to try and ascertain whether the "authenticate" part actually checks to see if the customer has input the correct info.

Initially they confirmed that they do ensure the correct info is entered, but when I pushed them it seems that they only check to make sure the card details could "potentially" be correct. i.e. they check that the card numbers match the card type, and that the expiry date is in the future etc, but they don't actually make sure they are correct.

They say because of the nature of this process they cannot make sure the card is valid until they approach the customers bank, which doesn't happen until we attempt to take a payment. They said it's due to the nature of the A&A offering, i.e. being able to take part payment and give up to 3 months to do it.

It's certainly nothing to do with Bluepark. Indeed this system makes it easier to deal with when it goes wrong. When we get a payment failure we tend to return the customers items to their basket (using the fab remote control feature!) and then contact the customer and ask them to checkout again.

Hope that helps

[little-linguist]

Chris,

I'm glad it's not just us having this problem!
Protx have at last got back to me and told me the same as you, i.e cards aren't actually checked until we try to authorise the transaction. This means that if a customer has entered the CVV number incorrectly or the expiry date is wrong, the transaction goes through initially but we can't bill the card.
Customers aren't getting back to us very often when we leave a message to say their card didn't repeat - mainly because they're out during the day when we call. We'll try the method of putting items back in their basket as you suggested as currently it's wasting a lot of our time and is very annoying!