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dvdcent
Nov '12

I have a major problem with your Authorize.net checkout page. The page where the customer is filling out his Billing Information. The field "State/Province/Region:" is pre-chosen as ALABAMA. As a result about 20% of my customers overlooking that field and leave it as ALABAMA instead of their correct state. As a result I have a very large amount of declined transactions due to the incorrectly chosen state. This is a major problem and the fix should be easy. Could you please add an empty space instead of ALABAMA for the "State/Province/Region:" field while still keeping this field required?



I'm using Buy Now button.



Please fix ASAP.



Thank you,



Russ.

E-junkie_GuruWebmaster & Support Guru
Nov '12

Thanks for the suggestion; I see you've also sent us an email about this, which we've assigned to Development for consideration.

asmdss
Nov '12

I was wondering why we had such a high number of declined transactions, that makes sense now.



E-junkie guru, how long does it usually take for minor changes such as this to be made?

E-junkie_GuruWebmaster & Support Guru
Nov '12

Development is working on this; we'll post an update once it's live.



It's actually a bit more complicated to implement than you might guess, because we not only need to add a blank item to the State menu and default the checkout form to that when the order has no tangible items, we also need to prevent submission of the checkout form if they leave that blank and give the buyer some feedback indicating what they did wrong, and make that play nice with our existing behavior for checkouts with Shipping, where the Billing address State initially defaults to the same State as the Shipping address.

dvdcent
Nov '12

E-junkieGuru, thank you for your attention to this problem. But this needs to be fixed urgently.



I lost thousands of dollars because of that, before I noticed the cause of this problem. My merchant account providers are not happy with such a huge percentage of declined transactions, their risk department is calling me regarding this issue and one merchant account provider closed my account just because I have a very high percentage of declined transactions. Plus my customers are confused when they receive a receipt with ALABAMA instead of their state.



E-junkieGuru, if you have access to my transactions statistics, please take a look and you will see that the are many transactions from Alabama, while zip code is from a different state. You will probably be able to see approved transactions only since some card issuers allow state mismatch. But I have tons of declined transactions and when I check them many of those have ALABAMA with the zip code from a different state.

dvdcent
Nov '12

Dear E-junkieGuru,



I see you made a nice fix. But "State/Province/Region:" field is not a required field anymore. A transaction can be processed without choosing the state.



"we also need to prevent submission of the checkout form if they leave that blank and give the buyer some feedback indicating what they did wrong" - this doesn't work.



I already see the transactions where there is no state indicated for billing address.



Thank you very much for fixing that!

E-junkie_GuruWebmaster & Support Guru
Nov '12

I'll have to bring that up with Development. It appears they did add a null-value menu item (labeled as "Select Your State") as the default menu selection, but I'm guessing they may still be working on the javascript validation code that would make it a required field for the US, Canada and Australia.



That's a bit tricky, as we also have to account for other countries that may not have states/provinces, in which case we show a text field (rather than a menu) that would need to be optional, and we also have to fit that within our existing validation script without causing any other troubles. Credit card companies take this sort of thing very seriously, so there's no room for mistakes or any unintended behavior; it has to work perfectly from the moment it goes live.