New MasterCard and Discover Processing Requirement

With regard to the message sent by Authorize.Net entitled "New MasterCard and Discover Processing Requirement", this is our official position: at this time no changes need to be made and no changes will be made to ProductCart.

This is based on the following considerations:

1. June 30, 2011 "deadline"
   Support for these requirements - which have been presented to you and to us completely "out of the blue" - does not need to be implemented until June 30, 2011, according to Authorize.Net.
   
2. Only Authorize.Net?
   Authorize.Net is the only payment gateway that has informed us of these requirements. If these changes are mandated by MasterCard and Discover, why aren't all payment gateways informing e-commerce vendors? It is unclear why other payment gateways have not informed us of these changes.
3. Only a few weeks?
   We were informed of these new requirements shortly before merchants were informed, which is also very strange. Typically software vendors are given months to apply changes to their applications. And these are not "trivial" changes.
   
4. No other notification?
   It is also unclear why we - as a merchant - did not receive any notifications from MasterCart, Discover, or our merchant account provider (which is Wells Fargo) with regard to these changes.

The entire matter is incredibly confusing.

The requirements - if confirmed - will translate into substantial changes to ProductCart's payment modules and will have to be carefully implemented and tested. This is not the sort of "fix" that can be implemented in a short amount of time. Substantial research and development will need to be performed.

In the meantime, we will try to get some clarifications on the matter and report back to you.


Edited by earlyimp - 22-July-2010 at 4:47pm

Authorize.Net sent an e-mail clarifying the situation. We received it on 7/8/2010. Here it is:

[...] Recently MasterCard and Discover relaxed the requirements for e-commerce merchants so that support for partial authorizations and balance responses are no longer required, but recommended best practices. All retail and mobile merchants, however, must still support the requirements.

Additionally, all merchants are still required to support authorization reversals for any non-settled authorizations. The deadline for all Authorize.Net merchants to support the requirements is still June 30, 2011.

IMPORTANT: Although no longer a requirement for e-commerce merchants, Authorize.Net intends to support partial authorizations and balance responses for all merchants. We highly recommend that your merchants provide support for these features as they can help decrease declined transactions and potentially increase sales.

You can review the timeline of when we expect support for each processor in our Partial Authorization FAQs at http://www.authorize.net/support/pafaqs#when.

We have also updated our FAQs to reflect the latest changes. If your merchants have questions, please refer them to the FAQs at http://www.authorize.net/support/pafaqs/ for additional information, including integration updates, value-adding services and more. [...]

In terms of ProductCart, we will look in the upcoming months at what "support authorization reversals for any non-settled authorizations" entails in terms of changes to our ecommerce software.