AVS Address Verification Fees

In 1996, VISA/MasterCard headquarters introduced a new regulation requiring all businesses who manually key in the majority of their credit card transactions to have a special fraud prevention feature on their credit card processing equipment. This feature is referred to as an address verification system, or AVS, (it checks to see that the billing address given by the customer matches the credit card). Enabling AVS in your merchant account is optional, but if you opt not to use AVS, VISA and MasterCard may not support your transactions and may charge you an additional 1.25% on those sales. Some merchant account providers also charge a per-transaction fee to perform the address verification during the purchase process.