Verified by Visa Rant
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How many of you even know what Verified by Visa is? Did you know that there is an equivalent service for MasterCard? How many of you have seen the commercials with Leslie Nielsen oblivioulsy avoiding one funny disaster after another while clutching his Visa Card. Did you understand what service he was selling?
I have a serious gripe about this as a merchant. Below is an e-mail that I wrote to Verified by Visa about the situation. If any of you out there are online vendors and have experienced the same thing, it would be a great idea if you could lend your voice to the complaints, because as it is, this situation isn't serving any one well. Thanks. Here is the e-mail:
I need to give you some very important feedback as an online merchant.Verified by Visa has not been doing a good job of informing the public at large about what Verified by Visa is. As a result, you have made it much more difficult for a merchant to carry on business. People are either abandoning orders or , when we are lucky, calling us and asking us to process manually what should have been a hands-off operation.
I was a marketing major and I know that the mark of a good commercial is not how funny it is or how many creative awards it gets, but how well it conveys the intended information.
Your commercials have been on for several years now and no one "gets" it. No one has a clue what it is all about. You really need to visually show the smiling real customer happily creating a password and then show fraudulent online transaction in process where the crook get's stumped because he hasn't managed to steal the verified by Visa password. That is the only way people will understand what it is that you are trying to accomplish.It would appear that few online sites yet have this Verified by Visa in place so individuals coming across it on my site don't have the time to read a bunch of stuff and just assume it is some sort of phishing thing. Further, many of my sales are to corporations where several individuals share a corporate credit card. Even when they do understand what is required, no one wants to be the one to tie the card up with a password that no one else will know or one that requires further administration for everyone in the office to use.
So I end up processing a lot of orders manually.I have spoken to many other merchants who feel the same way and I can't tell how cranky some of the customers are about this when they call me. We all appreciate the added security, but you really need to make that clear and your commercials must have cost you a fortune but they have been really inadequate at conveying the message.
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User Rant
As someone who orders stuff online I get seriously pied off with "Verified by Visa". Only a few of my transactions get "Verified by Visa" so I keep forgetting what it's all about when I come up against. Then the experience is so bad I end up in a real buers muddle so I find another site without "Verified by Visa" or order over the phone!
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It's a pain, and yet another password to remember. All the harder because it doesn't happen that often.
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That does seem to be the consensus. The trouble is as a merchant, I have absolutely no choice in the matter. My service provider is enrolled and that is that. I cannot opt out.
"It's for the customer's own protection blah blah blah". Great idea, bad execution. -
I have the same thing with Mastercard. My bank runs a thing called Clicksafe which works the same way. The other trouble with buying online is that you don't seem to be able to buy anything these days without opening an account with whatever merchant is offering the item...yet more bloody logins to remember....even if you only ever intend to buy that single item. Regular consumables like ink cartridges, I don't mind.
I long ago gave up on all this and now have a book at the site of my PC with all the different passwords in it....kind of negates the idea of having a password in the first place, if we ever have a break-in.
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@jclements said:
I believe the basic premise is you only need to remember the one passord for the encrypted file
... and if you forget your password?
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The samething that happens if you forget your spouse's birth date.
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Speaking of Passwords,
I found this link in one of the major PC magazines recently as a recommended utility:
http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/It is free.
It allows you to put all your user logins and passwards, etc., in an encrypted file. I believe the basic premise is you only need to remember the one passord for the encrypted file (which you can transfer to another PC to use provided you install the program on that PC), you open the file then can cut and paste the info into a login dialog.
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Luckily for me my wife's birthday is the day after my mothers. Now, when is my mom's birthday
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