Only ship to billing address

[islandcd]

Hi everyone hope someone can help, Just joined the forum and installed AbanteCart and really impressed with the included features and ease of use, well done guys!! I have been comparing different carts for the last couple of weeks and have to say nothing comes close to AbanteCart for ticking all the boxes for me.

Just one thing I need to work out on my site and that is, not give the customer the option to ship to an address other than the registered billing address, I have learnt from a bad experience earlier this year, being the victim of credit card fraud, I shipped a high value product to a supplied alternative address and as I did not ship to the registered card holders address my card processing company were unable to offer me any support.

Is there any way to turn this option off at the checkout stage.

Best regards

Peter
Island CD

[abantecart]

Currently, there is no way to require billing and shipping address to be the same. I think this is interesting point and might be important to have.

Opinions?

[llegrand]

Let me weigh in a bit here.  This is always a point of concern for online sellers and it would seem to be somewhat of a function of what was being sold - the type of customers one's site tends to attract, rather you ship internationally, etc. and perhaps your previous experience with bogus sales. In essence it is really dependent on what each shop is doing and wishes to do.

Here's some points of decision to consider:
1.  Do you allow for gifts?  If so, how would you accomodate your customer in that instance?
2.  Do you have individual customers who might wish to have something shipped to their workplace?
3.  Do you have business customers who might wish to have something shipped to their home?

It would seem to me that having the option for the cart owner to limit the ability to ship to a different address could be a good enhancement. 

But ultimately the cart owner need to weigh the possibility of lost sales due to too stringent rules against the real loss that has been incurred by bogus orders.

In the case islandcd cited,  perhaps having additional validation steps in the fulfillment process on certain dollar amounts with a different ship address could help manage the loss risk and not shut off gifts, etc.

1. Email the customer using the account information to verify the order and the shipping address.

2. Require a phone number on the account information and try and verify with phone number lookup

3. There are two phone numbers, one for VISA® and one for MasterCard, that you can call.  These are automated and will supply you with the phone number for the issuing bank of the credit card.  You can then call the issuing bank and request to do a name and address verification of the cardholder. VISA® - (800) VISA-750
MasterCard - (800) MC-ASSIS
Note:  these work for US cardholders,  I don't know about non-US cards but one should be able to check with their card centers.  If you  validate the number with the bank,  if there is a report of a card problem - they will let you know.


4. If not using PayPal,  consider using PayPal with seller protection.  If using PayPal,  see how you can use Seller Protection - it has not additional fees for you, but there are some rules to follow.
In conclusion - might be nice to have the option for sellers who wish to limit to that, but overall it's really up to the seller to install processes to verify when they feel an order is questionable.
Just another cart user.
Lee

[abantecart]

Great points llegrand!!!
I needed to justify if there is a value to have this as part of core or leave this for custom dev or someone to create an extension for this.

[islandcd]

You made some good points there llegrand, and possibility of lost sales due to too stringent rules is something I have had to think about in the past, but due to the card processing companies here in the UK taking a stand that if you ship to an address other than the card holders registered address, you will be fully liable for any charge backs, in my case 1 of $3750 and another that luckily I caught at the last minute and managed to recall the courier saving me a further $1800.

I am currently using a hosted solution, I won't name them on such a worthwhile forum, but they have a simple check box in the checkout options it says...

' The first part of this section allows you to choose whether you customers' can supply a delivery address that is different to their billing address or not. The main advantage of disabling this section is to prevent credit card fraud, as it ensures that the goods can only be delivered to the card holder's address. This is, of course, no good if you are offering a gift wrapping and delivery service as your customer may want the goods to be delivered to the person who is receiving the gift. You may also want to take into account that may people want their items delivered to their work place rather than their home during the working week.'

I think giving this simple option is a must, at least this way the merchant has the option to choose if he is prepared to take the risk or not.

Generally I find that a customer may contact me to explain they need it delivered to another address, in which case if they can pay by bank transfer, or PayPal if it is a confirmed address as you are then covered by the seller protection as llegrand pointed out, this way there is no problem and I will ship to any address they choose, including international.

[abantecart]

Ye. You can manually review order with not matching addresses on individual base.
Restricting different addresses might frustrate some good customers and load you with questions "How can I select different address?"

FYI. In the future, we are considering to build fraud detection system into AbanteCart. If you are interested to sponsor this development we can arrange with you sooner.