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Standalone 3D Secure service

You can use the standalone 3D Secure service to process 3D Secure authentication at a specific point in your transaction workflow.

Ordinarily, your customer would be requested to complete 3D Secure once a purchase is made and when you are attempting to apply a charge to your customer's payment card. However, in some instances, you may want to process 3D Secure as a distinct step.

What is standalone 3D Secure?

Standalone 3D Secure allows you to use the 3D Secure capabilities of Amazon Payment Services in a standalone API request, without executing the purchase or authorization transaction that would usually trigger 3D Secure authentication.

With the standalone 3D Secure service you can request that the user performs 3D Secure verification as a separate process, allowing you to authenticate the user's card without taking any further action.

Should you wish to do so, you can rely on the authentication that you achieve in this step to execute an authorize or purchase transaction at a later point in time.

It offers the convenience of performing 3D Secure checks at the stage of the transaction that suits your business process. In turn, you can process a charge to a card at a different, later stage of your transaction flow.

If you are a PCI-compliant merchant using our trusted channel you can request a 3D Secure check by supplying Amazon Payment Services with your customer's payment card details.

Where you use tokenization you can request a 3D Secure check by referring to the token name associated with your customer's payment card details. Amazon Payment Services will execute a 3D Secure check using the card details associated with the token name.

When should I use standalone 3D Secure?

There is a range of merchant use cases where you will want to ensure that your customer's payment card passes 3D Secure at a distinct point in time in the transaction workflow.

For example, you may want to process 3D Secure verification during customer sign-up without immediately applying a charge to your customer's payment card. You do so to ensure that you are reasonably sure that you can apply charges at a later time -- without interrupting the transaction flow as you wait for your customer to pass 3D Secure.

This may happen when you want to charge your customer only once you have shipped the items that your customer purchased, for example. Or where your customer enrolls in a service that they will only start to make use of at a later date.

Standalone 3D Secure in two steps

Note that the Standalone 3D Secure service involves a two-step process, and both steps must be performed to complete 3D Secure verification:

1 . Enrollment check. At this first step, Amazon Payment Services checks whether the customer's card is enrolled with 3D Secure. If the payment card is enrolled in 3D Secure the customer is passed through the 3DS authentication process and the customer sees a 3D Secure page. On this page, the customer enters the 3D Secure OTP that they received from their issuing bank. Once the customer clicks submit Amazon Payment Services receives and records the encrypted 3DS payload.

2 . Authentication. In this second step, Amazon Payment Services decrypts the 3DS payload. Using the merchant ID value we confirm whether the 3DS secure enrollment response successfully authenticates a transaction using the customer's card.

Alternatives to external 3D Secure

We offer merchants three alternatives to the standalone 3D Secure process:

  • Standard 3D Secure where we automatically pass a customer through the 3D Secure steps if a customer's payment card is enrolled in 3D Secure.

  • Flex 3D Secure where merchants can fine-tune the 3D Secure response to bypass 3D Secure on some transactions.

  • External 3D Secure service where you can choose to use an external 3D Secure processor instead of the Amazon Payment Services 3D Secure processing.

Go to the full API reference

This page is intended as a guide to help you understand the standalone 3D Secure service. Developers should review the full API reference for complete instructions on how to implement the standalone 3D Secure service.

Get in touch

Need advice on standalone 3D Secure? We would happily assist you -- just get in touch with our team to discuss your unique 3D Secure requirements by emailing the team at merchantsupport-ps@amazon.com.