Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lxgr 48 days ago
Capital One also offers it for their credit cards, which makes them the only ones usable in countries where requiring 3DS is common. (No idea why this is a thing actually – merchants get the fraud chargeback liability shift as soon as they request 3DS, whether the issuer actually supports it or not.)

The real problem is that in the US, almost no merchants request it in my experience, despite the fact that they'd get an almost free (in terms of conversion rate dropoff) liability shift. I suppose the few US issuers that do support it have a bad enough implementation that the conversion drop is still significant.
2 comments
zinekeller 48 days ago
> No idea why this is a thing actually

a) It still affects their bottom-line: the issuer might still try to dispute this using a different code despite payment scheme (formal term for Visa et al.) rules, and the merchant targeted is prone for fraud (for example, airlines have been hit with this by exploiting tourists looking for cheaper tickets by offering them suspiciously cheap tickets on seemingly-trustworthy websites by fraudsters and funding them by insecure cards)

b) Misinterpretation of mandatory rules: PDS2 is applicable only for EEA customer - EEA merchant, but some extended it for whole world despite the rules literally dictating the limits

c) Soft friction for encouraging domestic card usage: because of accept-all rules by payment schemes (and no local rules that allowed merchants in a region to reject international payments), this is a way to block US cards by guise of fraud prevention (because international cards are expensive for merchants to process)

link
lxgr 48 days ago
Wow, c) never occured to me but makes total sense.

b) can probably explain this happening for EU merchants, but I've also seen this in Japan and Central America, and I think even before PSD2 in the EU.

That's what I love about the payments space: While you're absorbed in your own game of checkers, you never know if your opponent is actually playing 1d or 10d chess :)

link
rstupek 48 days ago
Yeah from a software dev perspective the implementations are shockingly terrible from a UX perspective. I'm surprised Stripe doesn't make it automatic with their integration
link
lxgr 48 days ago
One problem is that the UX is largely defined by the issuer. 3DS (on the web) is literally an issuer-rendered iframe.
link