Identifying non-USA orders

[mwakeham]

Hi there,

 

We are a US software company that sells software products internationally. About 75% of our customer base is in the USA, and we accept all major credit cards for purchases.

 

The problem for us, however, is that although we abide by all of the merchant credit card rules & regulations, we have been bitten (as I expect many others might have been) by fraudulent transactions and illegitimate chargebacks from customers after they receive their unlock codes, etc.

 

If this happens in the USA, we can follow specific rules with the merchant processors to ensure that we got a correct AVS verification, and that the products were shipped only to the billing address on the credit card. We also use FedEx for delivery and require a signature confirmation to prove that the customer received the products ordered. This is all fine for US orders but....

 

There is no way of doing AVS on international orders and therefore a credit card purchase dispute is pretty much going to be awarded by the customer regardless of what we say. Although we carry the risk of losing a lot of money here (our average $ transaction is $1000-2000) the fact is that our biggest risk is damaging our relationship with our merchant processor who will shut us down if the dispute percentage exceeds 1% of our total sales. Hence, in some cases our customers have us over a barrel.

 

To mitigate the risks of doing business like this, we have decided to use a different merchant processor for International orders. One that is based offshore and although they charge us a lot more in fees, if there is a chargeback involved it will not affect our 1% dispute threshold for local merchant processing.

 

So I need to change our osCommerce system (we are running 2.1 I believe). I need to know that at the time of checkout, if the customer's bill address country is USA or NOT. If NOT, I will redirect them to order the products through our external processor. Otherwise we'll process the order locally.

 

Where should I start to look to tweak osCommerce to accommodate this? Is anyone else doing something similar and could share some insight on how they are handling this?

 

Myles

[user99999999]

Each payment module should have a Payment Zone option. If you set it to US then it will only allow that payment method for US billing address. Admin->Modules->Payment.

 

If you need to do something more complex you can edit the code in the payment module catalog/includes/modules/payment

 

The code looks like this

 

	function update_status() {
  global $order;

  if ( ($this->enabled == true) && ((int)MODULE_PAYMENT_CC_ZONE > 0) ) {
	$check_flag = false;
	$check_query = tep_db_query("select zone_id from " . TABLE_ZONES_TO_GEO_ZONES . " where geo_zone_id = '" . MODULE_PAYMENT_CC_ZONE . "' and zone_country_id = '" . $order->billing['country']['id'] . "' order by zone_id");
	while ($check = tep_db_fetch_array($check_query)) {
	  if ($check['zone_id'] < 1) {
		$check_flag = true;
		break;
	  } elseif ($check['zone_id'] == $order->billing['zone_id']) {
		$check_flag = true;
		break;
	  }
	}

	if ($check_flag == false) {
	  $this->enabled = false;
	}
  }
}

[mwakeham]

Each payment module should have a Payment Zone option. If you set it to US then it will only allow that payment method for US billing address. Admin->Modules->Payment.

 

Dave, you rock! Thanks for the tip. I'll take it from here.

 

Myles

[satish]

Your products are downloaded products(As they as software) so delivery address will not help.

 

Suggestion:

1)Do not allow free email ids to purchase.

2)get the IP range for US and apply ti your code and allow these for direct download for others the code needs to be modified so You approve and then they are allowed to download.

 

Satish