"Billing address" is the address to which the client receives statements and invoices from the bank. Credit and debit cards of Sberbank are opened without entering this parameter, but when paying for an order in foreign online stores, you must enter a billing address.
Residents of Russia rarely come across the concept of "Billing address". This term is adopted in the foreign banking system. However, there are situations when you need to fill in a field with this name, most often when ordering goods from foreign online stores.
What is "Billing Address"
“Billing Address” is a term from a foreign banking system, literally “billing address”. In a general sense, it means the address of the account holder, which he indicated when registering a card or deposit. Extracts and other documents on the movement of funds come to this address.
Online stores ask for this information in order to prevent fraudulent activity and to obtain additional confirmation of the identity of the account holder. When a transaction (debiting) is carried out, the billing address entered when filling out the questionnaire is checked against the general database of the Address Verification Service (AVS). If the information matches, payment will be made without additional delay. If not, the operation is rejected.
This is where difficulties arise for the owners of Russian cards. The fact is that Russian banks do not use billing addres in their work. And so there is no data in the system, they are not entered in AVS and transaction verification is impossible.
This does not mean that Russian citizens cannot shop in foreign online stores. In most cases, site owners are aware of the peculiarities of the banking system and simply skip the AVS reconciliation procedure. The billing address is saved in the internal database in order to carry out a new reconciliation in case of disputes. Sometimes they resort to manual data verification. Less often, the payment is rejected altogether.
Sometimes a billing address is required to be entered already when registering on large sites. In fact, this is a common formality. You cannot leave the field empty, but you can enter your address according to the place of residence or registration.
In other cases, you need to provide information when placing an order. In this case, select the address provided when receiving the card. The delivery address of the goods will also work. Online stores rarely resort to manual verification with the system.
How to find out "billing addres" of a Sberbank card
Like other financial institutions operating in the Russian Federation, Sberbank does not use the client's billing address and does not enter it into the system. Therefore, shopping on foreign sites is complicated.
In most cases, a simple method works - enter any fictitious address that looks like a Russian one. Since there is no reconciliation with the system in large online stores, the operation will most likely be approved.
But it would be wiser to choose a real address. You need to remember the data specified when ordering and issuing a card or account, the address of actual residence or registration. In this case, you can not be afraid of additional manual verification and transaction rejection.
When making a purchase, which will be paid for with a Sberbank card on a foreign website, enter the data in transliteration (in Latin letters), but in Russian. The standard procedure for entering data on American and European sites is as follows: street, house number, building, apartment. That is, an approximate billing address will look like this: ulica Lenina, 23-4. If you do not know how to correctly write the address in English letters, use the online transliteration services.
Despite the fact that, in fact, the introduction of a billing address for purchases with Russian cards is a simple formality, it should be taken seriously. Otherwise, the store may suspect that you are the owner of the card.
In disputable cases, the seller can apply for confirmation of the transaction to Sberbank. In this case, the bank will most likely approve the payment, but technical failures and delays may occur.
Practice shows that in most cases, payments are not rejected due to an incorrect billing address. In some cases, foreign online stores reject a payment made with a Sberbank card. But there are very few such sites, and all large organizations (Amazon, bestbuy, eBay, AliExpress and others) provide for the peculiarities of the Russian banking system and place orders without checking the billing address.
