Are you unknowingly refusing the money of customers who are ready, willing, and able to pay? You just might be . . .

If you have a merchant account, chances are good that you also have a control panel where you can adjust a number of settings for credit card processing.

Chances are also good that you haven't looked at those settings recently - and that could be costing you a lot of money.

For example, if you use AuthorizeNet (a well known payment gateway), the default settings could cause you to turn away almost all international customers.

To check on this, log into your AuthorizeNet control panel (http://authorizenet.com/), and select 'Settings', then 'Security', then 'Address Verification System'.

In the AVS security, pay careful attention to what kind of credit card transactions have been set to be rejected.

The options include:

Reject If... Address information is not provided for AVS Check AVS Error Non US Card Issuing Bank Retry, system is unavailable AVS is not supported by card issuing bank Address information for cardholder is unavailable

By default, these options will be selected, meaning your system will reject almost all cards from international customers.

This may not be what you want . . . in fact, if I used AuthorizeNet, I would uncheck all of the above.

Be sure to check this out for your own credit card processing systems - you might be turning away a large number of customers.