Are Sagepay's competitors better?

[amyd]

Hi,

We have 2 websites and one of them has a much higher proportion of failed transactions. I e-mailed some customers a few weeks ago to find out why they didn't complete the order and had a few replies - both said that the card had been declined and that they used the same card on a competitors website and it went through fine. So I called Sagepay this afternoon as I feel that there must be an issue with taking card payments. We couldn't get to the bottom of the issue, but he did mention that it could be that Sagepay didn't have the card number on their list of validated card numbers that the card issuers send to them once a month and that the competitor that they placed the order with used a different card processor that DID have the validated card number in THEIR system.

So I'm thinking that Sagepay might be a bit slow to add these validated card numbers which could be resulting in use losing sales and we might be better off with a better card processor.

Any thoughts on what has caused the higher proportion of failed transactions on one of our sites? Both sell the same products.

How can I find out what is happening with these failed transactions? I'd like to be able to watch what happens when people try to place an order so I can see if there any any problems that need fixing, but I don't think any programs allows you to watch secure sessions, or do they?

Does anyone have any thoughts on whether another payment processor would be better than sagepay?

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Amy

 

[makeusvisible]

there could be several things at play here;

It could be SagePay
It could be your checkout
It could be user error

Normall if you are getting "failed transactions" those should appear within your Sage account.... in which case you know it's not an issue with your cart, it's an issue with SagePay rejecting the card.

If the transactions are not in your Sage account, it is more likely an issue with your cart. In which case you need some deeper investigation.

 

[amyd]

there could be several things at play here;

It could be SagePay
It could be your checkout
It could be user error

Normall if you are getting "failed transactions" those should appear within your Sage account.... in which case you know it's not an issue with your cart, it's an issue with SagePay rejecting the card.

If the transactions are not in your Sage account, it is more likely an issue with your cart. In which case you need some deeper investigation.

Hi thanks for the reply! They did appear in sagepay, but when sagepay looked into it they couldn't find any information. The last 4 digits of the card weren't shown (null). Any ideas where to go from here?

I've asked my web developer and they say "it's due to the number of authorisation attempts exceeds the limit" error occurs when the customer has attempted to obtain authorisation more then the three times that is permitted.

This error is normally generated by the use of either the back or refresh browser buttons. Please ensure that your customers do not use either of these buttons within the transaction process to resolve this issue." But I find it hard to believe that all these failed transactions are due to user error - why wouldn't there be a similar amount on both sites in that case? They both have exactly the same products and checkout/platform.

Thanks!

 

[Paul Norman]

Sagepay are not the absolute best, but the challenges are more about handling big volumes than the area you mention. And, despite my opening comment, I would place them in the top 3 providers.

It is painful getting to the bottom of this, but as stated above, the problem could be in the handshake between your cart and Sagepay.

 

[makeusvisible]

My inkling would be that it is more likely to be an issue between your website, and the sage pay gateway....and more specifically the module/extension being used to allow the two to communicate.

What platform is your website running on, and what payment extension are you using?

 

[amyd]

Hi,

I thought it could be too, hopefully I can find the problem so we stop losing orders!

We have a Visualsoft site which is PHP based, what do you mean by payment extension? We use the version where the payment details are entered on our site, if that's what you mean?

Thanks!

 

[makeusvisible]

Are Visual soft using their own commerce platform, or are they using an open source platform such as Magento?

If the former, then they will have developed the module which links your site to Sagepay.

If the latter, they will have used a payment extension such as this; http://www.magentocommerce.com/mage...e-europe-free-sagepay-official-extension.html

 

[amyd]

Hi,

It's their own ecommerce platform, but I've had my suspicions that it was developed from magento.

Thanks

 

[makeusvisible]

Are your developers not able to help investigate and diagnose the issue?

 

[MattCollins]

As MakeUsAWebsite says, you might want to ask Visualsoft to look into this for you to see what information is being passed between your website and SagePay. They should hopefully be able to verify that your website is sending appropriate information to SagePay, see how many times customers are attempting the transactions, and see what error information the SagePay system is responding with, which may help troubleshoot things further. (Sensitive information such as credit card numbers shouldn't be logged.)

Are the two sites connected to the same merchant account? If not, it's possible that one merchant account is being treated with more suspicion by the card issuers for some reason.

 

[LMDServicesUK]

Hi

If SagePay are still using a local d/base of authorised cards as such, that then needs updating every month, then I would get away from them PDQ.

This methodology was dropped a long time ago. Rather SagePay's gateway SHOULD be issuing an authorisation request to the Card Issuer (through your merchant Services Provider) who will then validate the card details as provided and this is a real time process..

With our Gateway service the authorisation request is passed to the Merchant Services Processor who then obtains a real time authorisation from the Card Issuer once the card has been validated and the funds approved.

We also record the tx at every stage and also provide a traffic light record of the security checks that the card transaction has to go through and their results. We also record the full card details for referral back by the Merchant if there is ever a problem with a tx in the future. e.g a Charge Back claim.

The information is then stored in our systems but can be then accessed by the Merchant through their MMS if they need to check a query on a given transaction, thus ensuring that we retain the PCI management responsibility for the protection of the card details rather than the Merchant.

The issue does sound like a problem between SagePay and your shopping cart, however a Decline can be caused by the card details not being verified or the customer having insufficient funds..

You will not be told the exact reason but at the very least you should be able to see through SagePay which security check the card tx failed on if that is the reason for the decline ?

I would also strongly suggest that you insist on being put through to 2nd line support as I think you have been spun a tale by SagePay CS as to how it checks the card details or at least I hope you have !

Can you advise whose shopping cart you are using with version number, and I will see if we could offer you an alternative service, we also can support integrated or hosted redirect which ever you prefer ?

OM me if you need any further help..

 

[Sage Pay Support]

Hi Amy,

Sorry we didn't get to the bottom of this during your call yesterday.

It could be a number of things, but it's much more likely to be a technical issue than anything else and we can definitely get this sorted for you.

Our accepted card ranges are updated as soon as the issuers release the new card data to us, so it's unlikely that these failures you're seeing are caused by that.We process authorisations through the secure merchant banking network, not using a local database so we should be able to pin point exactly where in the transaction things aren't happening as they should.

It's also unlikely that it's a security check that's causing the failure, because your customers would be advised that would be the reason for the decline and you'd see that reason in your My Sage Pay admin area.

I'd really like to get a look at some example transactions for you so I can pin point exactly where in the transaction process the failures are happening. If you can email me some examples from the last 3 days, I can get into the logs for you and have a look and we can get to the bottom of it.

If you can email me at feedback@ sagepay.com with the examples and your account ref or vendorname, I'll pick this up with my team today and we'll get it sorted for you.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Becca Bell
Customer Relations Manager
Sage Pay

 

[amyd]

As MakeUsAWebsite says, you might want to ask Visualsoft to look into this for you to see what information is being passed between your website and SagePay. They should hopefully be able to verify that your website is sending appropriate information to SagePay, see how many times customers are attempting the transactions, and see what error information the SagePay system is responding with, which may help troubleshoot things further. (Sensitive information such as credit card numbers shouldn't be logged.)

Are the two sites connected to the same merchant account? If not, it's possible that one merchant account is being treated with more suspicion by the card issuers for some reason.

Hi Matt, Thanks for the reply. I've asked Visualsoft to dig deeper so we'll see what they come up with. They have different merchant accounts, that's a good idea. I'll give our merchant bank a call to see if there are any differences.

@LMDServicesUK Thanks for the information! I'd like to know if this is how @Sage Pay Support works:

This methodology was dropped a long time ago. Rather SagePay's gateway SHOULD be issuing an authorisation request to the Card Issuer (through your merchant Services Provider) who will then validate the card details as provided and this is a real time process..?

As the transactions were older than 3 days they couldn't dig deeper on the transactions. So it seems unless I call within 3 days of a declined transaction they won't be much help. We don't have any example in the last 3 days. That's basically what I was told when I called, call back within 3 days of a failed transaction.

 

[Sage Pay Support]

Hi Amy,

Just wanted to confirm as in my last post that Sage Pay processes real time authorisations through your merchant bank and the card issuers, not using a local database as suggested by LMDServicesUK.

Our systems and authorisation processes are bank approved and PCI level 1 compliant and use the most current practices and processes to keep your customer data safe and secure.

If you could pop me any examples, even if they are more than 3 days old, I might still be able to spot some consistencies or see if our operations team can un-archive the detailed logs.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Becca