Payment gateways and billing addresses

Hello,

I apologize that my question may not be strictly be about CB Subs, but I'm thinking you may readily know the answer through all the work you all have done on payment gateways.

I want to collect website user names and street addresses on a subscription site, and would like to use subscription payment to verify that that the user is actually who they say they are - that is, I'd like to use the address verification that the payment gateway does with a credit card company to verify that a person with the registered name receives a credit card bill at the registered address.

I was planning to use Paypal Payments Standard, but it doesn't seem to return any billing information in PDT or IPN notifications. I tried doing an end run by requiring a shipping address, but can't require that the shipping address and billing address be the same. I can send the invoice address from CB Subs, and have a default on Paypal that shipping and billing addresses are the same, but there's nothing preventing the user from editing the shipping address at Paypal, and that's all I get back in IPN/PDT (just to be clear - there are actually no physical products to be shipped, I just thought of possibly using the shipping address this way since it's available in IPN and PDT notifications).

Do you know of a way to get billing name and address returned by Paypal, or if they're readily available in notifications provided through another payment gateway?

Thanks very much.

We don't do address verification. Payment gateways typically won't either unless they require it for some reason like 3-D Secure. Even then they just tell you more or less a yes/no if it was verified. When we do get billing details back from the payment provider they are set into the IPN, but beyond storing them for logging purposes in CBSubs > Notifications we don't do anything with those details (we don't need to as it's irrelevant to CBSubs functioning) and it's not often they send back billing address. Not sure I understand why you need this though. It doesn't prove identity.

Thank you Kyle. I will try to address with payment gateways directly, starting with Paypal.

I'd also like to follow up and ask about your comment that name and address verification wouldn't "prove identity." I realize this is, strictly, true, but my thought was that it would prove identity with the limited exception that a registered user might use someone else's credit card, either with permission (i.e., parent's card, spouse's card) or due to identity theft or other fraud. Is that what you meant, or did you have something else in mind?

Thanks again.

It's not worth trying to prove someones identity without any real information to do that. For example you can get millions of peoples addresses with a simple Google search. It doesn't prove anything. Another case is someone could be in one location, but technically live in another so their current address may not match that of the card (e.g. students are currently in a dorm, but their bank account is to their parents address).

Leave the fraud protection to the payment gateway it self. PayPal Standard already does any necessary fraud protection checks. Additionally you can choose not to accept cards directly and require they login which is additional security (set PayPal Account Optional to Off).