Challenges of Export and International Payments in Ecommerce

As a global exporter of British food in both retail and wholesale sectors, the team at British Corner Shop have first hand experience of some of the challenges faced when using a payment gateway for international business.  Peter Howarth, British Corner Shop’s technical director gives us an insight…

Having used Sage Pay (and formerly Protx) since 2004, we’ve grown from a small start-up to a large business using Sage Pay throughout the businesses evolution. The first thing we wanted from our payment gateway was good customer support, and a technical solution that we knew would meet our requirements at each stage of growth. Sage Pay’s capable support staff, and range of integrations are ideal in these regards.  But as an exporting company, the most important aspect for us was internationalisation and exporting.

The Challenges

When it comes to internationalisation, here are a few things to consider:

1. Payment in Different Currencies
2. Customer Perceptions of Restrictions
3. An Appropriate Rulebase
4. International Maestro
5. Fraud

 

1. Payment in Different Currencies

This is an important capability, some e-commerce sites let you view prices on screen in various currencies, but when it actually comes to payment they’ll only accept one – GBP for example.

This is a real barrier for many customers who want to pay in their local currency, especially when exchange rates are favourable.

Sage Pay makes this easy, the solution we have employed is to have a separate vendor name, and merchant account for each currency. The currency code GBP, EUR, USD etc. can then simply be specified with the transaction information.

Multiple vendor names can be grouped, so Sage Pay don’t charge you for each one, and it neatly separates the currencies for accounting purposes.

2. Customer Perceptions of Restrictions

Sometimes customers think that their card won’t work because it’s registered overseas. However most of the time, if a transaction does fail, it can be traced to an incorrectly entered 3D secure password!

The good news is that with an appropriate rulebase in Sage Pay, such address issues are easily avoided.

3. An Appropriate Rulebase

By setting your rulebase to accept either a CV2 value OR an Address Match, you ensure that cards registered in any country will be accepted. Enforcing address matching can result in a failed transaction for overseas cards because sometimes it’s not possible to check addresses based outside of the UK.

This doesn’t have to compromise security, combined with 3D Secure we find that fraudulent transactions are minimised.

4. International Maestro

This card type is optional and needs to be added to non-GBP currency accounts. Make sure it’s included, otherwise you could be missing out on business.  Don’t forget, to be able to accept international maestro, you must have 3D Secure switched on in your account.

5. Fraud

A combination of a decent rulebase and the 3rd Man Results, that Sage Pay provide within My Sage Pay, give you an excellent chance of spotting and stopping fraud.

The problem can be worse for exporters, as they tend to get a higher incidence of people trying stolen card details to attempt to receive an order overseas.

Sage Pay does allow you to block specific countries altogether, and if you take that approach I would recommend that Nigeria and Vietnam be high on your list!

However, we find that the number of fraudulent transactions is relatively low overall, and with experience and the help of the 3rd Man Results we can generally spot frauds easily, and don’t dispatch any goods until we have confirmed things.