Ensuring the security of your credit processing partner is a key part of limiting your losses and running a successful on line business. While the great upside of selling on line is that you can reach potential buyers throughout the world, it also opens the door to potential fraud. As a result, it’s important to work with a card processor that uses state of the art fraud protection tools to limit your losses and allows you to focus on legitimate customers.
The types of problems that arise with eCommerce processing range from card theft to charge backs, all of which can be limited by applying the latest screening techniques before you accept a given transaction. Advanced systems utilize databases to provide multiple checks on authenticity, including working with credit card companies to verify that transactions are not irregular. Master Card even provides an additional authentication program to ensure that buyers are the actual owners of the card, in addition to asking identification questions and checking for secondary CVV number matches. These verification tools ensure that the user has the physical credit card along with the numeric code on the back, which prevents unauthorized theft of just the card number. Verified by Visa and MasterCard Secure provide an additional layer of protection that ensures that first time customers are legitimate users while allowing repeat customers easier access to checkout.
You can take addition steps to limit fraud by only accepting genuine credit cards rather than pre-paid cards, which may have untraceable owners. Additionally, limiting your shipment area can cut down on fraud, as well as keeping your business focused on a given region. While these measures might place some limitations on your sales potential, they will pay great dividends in ensuring the quality of your transactions. There are a number of tools that quality processors employ including address verification, card security checks as well as identity verification from cross referencing public databases. Third party databases often contain anonymous data that can spot irregular buying behavior and limit unusual transactions which have a high probability of fraud.
To take a step beyond just accepting a card, these databases can require users to verify their age or identity based upon publicly available credit information. The industry as a whole has worked to ensure the highest forms of encryption standards according to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards which ensure that all data is transmitted with the higher level of security. There are many patterns that emerge which require further verification, such as the choice of overnight shipping on a relatively inexpensive order or a phone number area code that does not match the shipping address. Another important step that merchants can take is to have a “cooling off” period on international orders to allow you to double check with the credit company, and also to ensure that the IP address of orders is coming from the same country of origin as the shipping address. While some individuals may buy gifts to ship to another address than their billing address, it is an unusual sign for a product to be shipping outside of the country, especially on large orders. For large orders, it may be a good practice to call the billing number on record to physically verify the buyer – while this can take time, it can save you a lot of hassle in the future.