A "false negative" occurs when a customer purchasing from a Web store experiences an HTTP time-out after entering payment information and clicking "submit." Studies have shown that consumers who wait longer than ten seconds for a transaction to make the round trip from their browser through the appropriate financial processing network and back, tend to lose patience quickly, and, assuming the transaction "didn't go through," then click the "Submit" button again. Typically, the original transaction is still live in the pipeline, such that when the HTTP time-out ends, two transactions for the same item are processed.

Consumers Get Mad, Processors Get Even

When the consumers' credit card bill arrives, it shows two charges for the same item, and the fun begins. The consumer, angry at being double-billed, calls or emails the merchant to resolve the problem.  The best case is that a support person responds immediately, solves the problem with apologies, and eliminates the bad taste the consumer was beginning to get regarding this particular merchant -- not to mention the general experience of buying over the Internet.

Unfortunately, this is a costly solution for merchants.   And the costs mount as additional fees are assessed by credit card processing services for leaving "dirty laundry" on the network in the form of bad transaction data.  These costs directly impact a merchant's bottom line.  If you're a small merchant, you simply can't afford the additional processing fees (which are calculable) and the damage to your reputation among consumers (which is incalculable).   If you're a large merchant the same basic equation applies, simply scaled up according to your transaction volume.

Getting It Right

PaymentNet has solved the double billing problem by implementing its payment processing engine using its own proprietary protocol rather than HTTP to manage transactions through the processing network and back.

This solution allows PaymentNet to provide transaction response times of 10 seconds or less.  And PaymentNet-processed transactions generally complete the circuit in less than four seconds!