Implementing Visa's password-based Verified by Visa payment security system wasn’t quick or easy for 1010Tires.com, but it’s paid off by increasing the tire retailer’s ability to accept foreign transactions as well as block fraudulent ones, president Sofia Volpov tells InternetRetailer.com. In one incident, 1010Tires rejected a transaction worth more than $1,000 because the purchaser couldn’t enter the personal identification number required by the Verified by Visa program, she says. "The person apparently didn’t realize the card was signed up with Verified by Visa and didn’t know the password," she says.
1010Tires, whose average order size is $500, has also started to rely on Verified by Visa and MasterCard International’s similar SecureCode program to process purchase transactions from consumers outside of North America – a risk it has avoided up to now, even though it ships to a large foreign customer base. "Up to now we would not take online purchase transactions from foreign orders," she says. "They had to be prepaid."
Volpov notes that 1010Tires recently accepted one large online order from overseas that it otherwise would have rejected for online payment. "The cardholder’s bank was registered with Verified by Visa, so we took his payment online," she says.
Realizing the benefits of the payment security programs took more than two months, she adds, because implementing the Verified by Visa and SecureCode software applications, which coincided with 1010Tires’s transition to an automated online order taking system, required the writing of new code into its online shopping cart mechanism.
She adds that other challenges have also popped up. Because many consumers now run software on their computers that block pop-up ads from appearing on their screens, they may not see the Verified by Visa or SecureCode windows that pop up to request their passwords to complete a purchase transaction. And that may persuade the customer to abort the purchase transaction. In these cases, 1010Tires is able to monitor incoming transactions that are registered with the Visa or MasterCard program and contact the consumer to suggest they re-enter their transaction but with their pop-up blocking software turned off.
"We feel like a pioneer in this," Volpov says. "But overall we’re happy that we have Verified by Visa and SecureCode. It’s an ideal situation for merchants. I just wish that more merchants would use it, so that customers are more aware of how it works and won’t ask us so many questions."
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