Well it is a very viable option. As someone that works in this industry 24 hours a day 7 days a week I can say that I've seen so many merchant processing scenarios that I can't even begin to go into all.
But what I can say is that small-mid sized merchants that don't want to lose money do not reject cards just because an address doesn't match. What they do is accept the card and call the client afterwards to verify the info. If they cannot verify or get the customer on the phone they can always go into the Virtual Terminal to void the transaction (that's what virtual terminals are for).
The address could not match for trival reasons such as the bank/card issuer somehow losing the primary address on file and the customer may have to call them to re-add that number.
As for higher fees you can always negotiate a lower non-qualified rate because the transaction will fall under non-qualified as it's risker, but what's worse, paying 0.75-1.00 percentage ponits higher or losing the sale completely?
We can get into the "banks are bad, merchants are good" argument by talking about the responsibility that the banks do not want to take on, but I can assure you that Visa/MC and acquiring banks do already take on ALOT in the area of combatting fraud.
Furthermore yes the customer's bank has the information needed but they rely on the customer to enter that information for verification purposes.
If you would like to discuss this via email contact me any time at
msinfo@merchantseek.com
Joe
Merchantseek.com
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