AVS Sensitivity / Best Practices

Good morning,

We are using AVS, and unless the AVS results in a success response code, we do not accept the payment on our website.

The concern comes from customers that insist they are providing the correct address as it appears on their statement from the bank, but it still is not getting accepted. When we examine the response codes, these problematic ones are usually a code of W (Postal code matches, street address does not).

How sensitive is AVS? Is it a direct 1:1 match with the address on file at the bank? Are there tolerances for say abbreviations?

  • Ave/Avenue
  • Street/St.
  • Court/Ct
  • Drive/Dr
  • PO Box/P.O. Box
  • P.O./P.O
  • etc...

Is it up to the bank? If my statement says Avenue, but I use Ave during payment, is it rejected?

Thank you!

  • RR_Moneris
    Ultimately its the issuer that does the match. Some of the issuers may just check for loose matches while some more restrictive. False negatives are common with AVS. You could consider accepting partial matches as well.

    How are you passing the street address? are you doing a setStreetNumber and setStreetName? Official what we are told is that card holder should just enter as is with their bank. But just curious, what happens if you just pass the street number and street name and not include Avenue?
  • GroundHog

    In reply to RR_Moneris:

    Thank you for the response! While I was waiting, I did some more reading and I found (on Wikipedia) that AVS only considers the street number, and zip/postal code. So if on Address 1, the customer includes their street number and perhaps their unit or PO box, those additional numbers can cause the validation to fail.

    As for what we're doing, we're using a PCI-DSS compliant payment processor. It takes the customer payment details and sends them off to Moneris. I'm not exactly sure how it's doing this, but there are only two address text boxes. I'm willing to bet part of the problem is what I described in the first paragraph. Customers are probably entering too much information there and it causes the street portion of the address validation to fail.

    However - this assumption is all riding on whether or not what I read on Wikipedia is accurate - does AVS really only care about the street number?

  • GroundHog

    In reply to GroundHog:

    Moneris - can we get confirmation that AVS as a whole only looks at the street number and zip/postal like Wikipedia said?
  • RR_Moneris

    In reply to GroundHog:

    Hi, actually that's not true for all issuers. For example, if I test it with my own card and just put street number and postal code, it only gives me a match on the postal code. For it to give me a full match, they expect both the street number and street name.

    So is the issue that you are getting a lot of mismatches on the AVS results? False negatives on street address part are common.