AuthorizeNet's Inconvenient Risk-Avoidance Strategy
AuthorizeNet, a merchant account processor for thousands of online retailers, decided recently that credit cards issued by banks outside the US are not a good risk this week. So this evening at 9pm ET, they turned off the ability for every single one of their merchant customers to accept non-US cards. Luckily they did send three email bulletins to customers prior to this. It was still a major inconvenience.
Here at Sherpa we had to send someone back to the office three hours after closing, to go online and manually turn our AuthorizeNet settings back to accept non-US cards again. During the few minutes that took, three Sherpa shoppers from Canada all had their perfectly good credit cards declined. I understand the need for security online these days, but come on! Are Canadians less trustworthy than Americans? I think not.
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