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Sometimes you’ve just got to shake your head and wonder what some businesses are thinking. Just today I found out a special offer from a site that was offering a special deal on their keyword product.

It seemed like something worth trying out at Wordze and I was looking forward to signing-up for their 30 day offer but their online form won’t process my U.S. credit card because the I’m in the U.K. and my IP address is currently not from the U.S.

Brilliant thinking. People don’t travel or are stationed out of the country. Hey, Wordze dudes, Let’s put hurdles and obstacles in the way of making sales.

Here is the huge confidence loser for me with this company, if they can’t even put an adequate system in place to process payments from buyers, what gives anyone the confidence to think that their system, that I would be paying for access to, will be smart or bright? Have they never heard of Visa or MasterCard checkout applets from 2005 or maybe using PayPal?

You’ve got to wonder, if they can’t handle proper cart software, what makes me think they even know how to have proper data protection in place, or is that too difficult as well?

On my online stores we take international credit card payments via a merchant account and PayPal and fraud is never a problem. That’s simply because you have to look at the entire sales cycle with detail and use solutions that allow your customers to buy the product while at the same time using surgical skills to catch the fraud boys, not block the 99% of other legitimate buyers.

So follow this email thread for a moment and see if this is the way your staff or company would handle a sale problem. If so, quit and go to a smarter company.

Me: Hi, I want to purchase your product but I’m having problems with the checkout system not processing my credit card because the cart says my IP address is out of the country.

Them: We block transactions that don’t align with the billing, as mis-match locations are the #1 sign of credit card fraud.

Me: OK, but in this case it is the #1 sign of a purchaser that can’t buy your product. Are you telling me to go pay for Keyword Country instead, because they do take my credit card?

Them: Our fraud control is standard, and if a small percent of people cant get in because of that, we cant help it as we rather protect people from false charges, than to provide an outlet to fraud.

[NOTE: What people are they protecting from false charges? That's right, themselves, not "people". I guess they think crooks have never thought using of a proxy server before to make it appear they are in the US?]

Me: Off to Keyword Country to give them my money.

So What Makes Me All Hell Fire Mad Here

How much business smarts does it take to know if you are blocking people from purchasing your product that you can put in place effective solutions to deal with that to make sales. Let’s just take a look at solutions like the Authorize.net Fraud Detection Suite that will block sales from specific IP address that have been linked to fraud instead of blocking all of the rest of the world.

Hell, Wordze might have well said “Sorry, we are not bright enough to use effective cart technology to allow people to buy our product. Go spend your money some place else.” Wait, that is what they said.

Idiots.

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Steve

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