Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode

Hi John,

ProductCart also supports 3-D Secure as part of the SagePay (formerly ProtX) integration.

The reason why support for this fraud protection system is somewhat limited is that it never really took off (it is virtually never requested by ProductCart merchants).

There are many reasons why this is an unpopular feature among online buyers (and therefore among merchants trying to sell products and services to them):

(a) It adds one step to the checkout process
(b) Consumers are often confused on what they are being asked to do
(c) Major online retailers such as Amazon have refused to use it

The main problem with 3-D Secure is that many claim it results in a higher drop-off rate: buyers don't know what to do (or have simply forgotten the additional credentials needed to go passed that step) and simply leave.

Since no merchants would ever want to add a feature that causes customers to drop-off, they simply do not use 3-D Secure except when forced to do so.

A case in which they appear to be strongly pressured to adopt 3-D Secure is when they operate in the UK. That's because Maestro (popular credit card provider in the UK) requires that merchants use 3-D Secure for all transactions. So if you want to accept Maestro cards, you have to support 3D-Secure. Major payment systems like Google Checkout, which so far has not chosen to support 3-D Secure, have therefore dropped Maestro (see link below).

The benefit of using 3-D Secure is that it can reduce fraudulent transactions, and therefore chargebacks.

Here are some articles/blog postings on this topic:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verified_by_visa
- Google Checkout UK stops supporting Maestro
- http://econsultancy.com/blog/3887-verified-by-visa-a-conversion-rate-killer

Note that all of the above could and will likely change over time.

Hi,
  It is not an option for offline processing because it's against the Visa rules to store the code.
See : http://usa.visa.com/personal/security/visa_security_program/3_digit_security_code.html
 (Final sentence)