New Security Issues could be crippling sales
This last week may have seen an unnecessary drop in sales for
users of shopping carts and credit card clearing merchants:
In a very confusing and frustrating week, I am finally able to
clarify -- I hope -- the security situation between shopping carts
and "managed URL's" at Authorize.net. Many people that have tried
to order e-books from my site were declined because of a confusing
security policy. This may affect you as well, so I wanted to share
our experience:
As it turns out, you must check your shopping cart's specific policy
with regard to "Managed URL's". A managed URL is a specified URL
that lets clearing companies know that the charge is coming from your
URL. It's a security issue.
HOWEVER, in the case of some shopping cart companies and clearing
companies like Authorize.net, the cart company ALREADY HAS a
pre-existing function that actually PROHIBITS specific URL's. So if
you are generating sales from pages other than those coming from your
cart company, a conflict occurs and your cart sales are blocked. In
this case, by specifying a referring URL to Authorize.net from my
particular shopping cart, it was actually blocking sales coming
directly from my web site that needed no cart.
The solution is to call your clearing company (like Authorize.net)
and create a second account (usually at no cost) especially for the
cart company, so that its own transactions won't conflict with any
others that are driven from your site.
I'm bringing this to your attention because it was very confusing and
no doubt lost me sales.
Received on Thu Jun 13 2002 - 14:52:13 CDT
