Hello @marekop,
I understand you have customers letting you know they are getting an error at checkout that their billing address is incorrect. I’d like to share a bit more information on why that might be happening for them.
In September, GoDaddy Payments added an additional address verification check (known as AVS check) for exact billing address matching. Originally they were only using the billing postal code, and found that merchants were getting a large amount of fraudulent orders placed and then chargebacks made to collect the funds from those transactions. Once they added the billing address matching, those charges have been almost eliminated for most of our merchants. It is much more difficult to find an address that exactly matches what a bank has on file for a credit card than it is for a matching postal code.
That said, it has created more instances of what your customers are seeing, due to formatting, casing of words, and abbreviations. We do find that one of the most common reasons for Canadian and European mismatches are the postal codes (maybe the bank doesn’t include the space or replaces it with a dash), and for US addresses that customers are not using an Upper Case Letter at the beginning of their street names. In addition, “Ave.” is considered different than “Avenue” or “Ave” for some of these banks, which then leads to many more declines if those kinds of road type abbreviations do not match.
The issue seems to be more prominent with those outside the USA because a bank can have a postal code stored in the customer’s account in a different format than what the customer may expect, such as removing/adding the space, lowercase letters instead of capital, or even putting in a hyphen. All of those could potentially cause the mismatch alert if the bank holds strict rules on what percent of the AVS check needs to match. From what I have heard from our GoDaddy Payments support engineers, most banks require an 85% match, but some can be up to 98-100% match to be accepted.
To be sure this is what is happening, you can enable the debug log for your gateway, which can be found at WooCommerce > Settings > Payments > GoDaddy Payments > Debug Mode. This will keep a record of your orders and will also let us know if the mismatch is with the postal code, the address, or both. You can view these logs at WooCommerce > Status > Logs, then search for logs starting with “godaddy”. Within that log, you can search (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) for NO_MATCH and see if those come up in the log, which confirms that this is the issue happening to your customers. It seems that you already have done this and confirmed this is what is occurring.
If you are finding this is happening more than it is not, I would encourage you to do two things. First, you can create a note on your checkout page to remind customers that all of their billing information must match what their bank has on file for their credit card. If you use a page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder, you can edit the Checkout page to add a text box at the top with this notice.
Second, you can set up and enable the GoDaddy In Person gateway under WooCommerce > Settings > Payments. This will create an additional payment button in the Order Details for an order where you can “Charge with Virtual Terminal.” This way you can reach out to the customer if their order remains in Pending Payment, and take their payment information over the phone, submitting it via that button. Charge with Virtual Terminal button We find that the same address information can be accepted most of the time with the Terminal where the gateway may not succeed. To allow you to catch these orders, you may want to extend the “Hold Stock” value you have for your Inventory to at least 180 minutes or remove it altogether if you find you don’t need it. Once that Hold Stock time is reached, any Pending Payment orders will move to Cancelled and then you will no longer be allowed to take payment via the Charge with Virtual Terminal button.
Would you please let me know if that is helpful information, and what further questions you have?
Best wishes,
Zach | SkyVerge Support
