The Address Verification System (AVS) is a system used to verify the identity of the person claiming to own the credit card. The system will check the billing address of the credit card provided by the user with the address on file at the credit card company. The other security features for the credit card include the CVV2 number and the expiration date. Credit cards A credit card system is a type of retail transaction settlement and credit system, named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. ... The Card Security Code is located on the back of MasterCard, Visa and Discover credit or debit cards and is typically a separate group of 3 digits to the right of the signature strip. ...
AVS verifies the numeric portions of a cardholders billing address. For example, if your address is 101 Main Street, Highland, CA 92346, AVS will check 101 and 92346. Sometimes AVS checks additional digits such as as apartment number, other times it does not. As a result you may receive false negatives from e-commerce verification systems, which may require manual overrides. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with electronic business. ...
AVS Support
At present, only a few countries support AVS on Visa and MasterCard, notably the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom. American Express does support AVS in more countries.
Cardholders with a bank that does not support AVS may receive an error from Internet stores due to the lack of data.
If AVS indicates that the billing address provided with the order doesnÃt match the address on file with the card issuer, the merchant may have reason to suspect a fraudulent transaction and therefore choose to delay fulfillment until the customerÃs identity is reasonably confirmed.
Or the customer may have given the address of a second residence or forgotten to include a post office box number that is part of the billing address.
To be able to use the system, merchants must enhance their systems software so that billing address data is extracted automatically from the order information taken during the normal course of the transaction.
If you get an AVS code indicating that the address and/or zip code do not match, it is up to you to decide whether you wish to accept the risk and ship the goods to the customer to complete the transaction.
The AVS system isn't always reliable; bad results can be triggered unnecessarily because people move, or because some people report five-digit zip codes and some report nine-digit zip codes.
At this time the merchant can obtain more information from the customer to verify why the address didn't match such as recently moved, city changed zip codes, etc. The merchant can also ensure their product is shipped via registered mail with a return signed receipt to ensure it was received by the proper person.