Every Tuesday, the Volusion team will be posting quick educational videos to help you further succeed online. Today’s episode teaches you how to prevent credit card fraud.
Happy Tuesday! Congratulations on making it through another Monday. As a reward for your hard work, take a quick break (two minutes to be exact), and check out the latest video in our Two Minute Tuesday series. Today you’ll learn some basic steps in preventing credit card fraud and why PCI Certification is so beneficial to your online business.
I hope this information can help you fight hackers and fraudsters before they strike. If you have any other topics you’d like covered, leave a comment below or shoot me an email at matthew_winn(at)volusion.com.
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Here’s the transcript if you’d like to follow along:
Hi everybody. My name’s Matt and I’m a Marketing Associate here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success. Today we’re going to answer a very important question when selling online, and that’s how to protect yourself and your customers from credit card fraud.
This is really important when you’re selling online, and unfortunately, it’s not one of the most fun parts of it. But being prepared can really help you save a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of headaches. Let’s get started.
First and foremost you want to pick the right ecommerce provider. When you’re looking around to decide who you want to open your online business with, find someone that’s PCI Certified. PCI Compliance just isn’t enough anymore, especially with the number of credit card fraud incidences shooting through the roof. PCI Certified means that the provider has gone through a lot of extra measures to become certified, which means you get to take advantage of the benefit of that by only needing to take a few extra steps to achieve that same level of certification.
The next thing you can do is to watch out for unusually large orders. If you’re selling digital cameras that usually run for $80-$100 a pop, and you receive an order for 45 of them, that’s probably something you’ll want to investigate. Fraudsters want to get high dollar items for high dollar items – if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
Next, beware of high risk geographies. If you’re selling internationally, that’s fine, but pay special attention to countries that are known as high-risk for credit card fraud. These include African nations, places in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. So if you’re getting an order from one of these places, take a look into it. You may even want to just cancel the order.
Next, just use common sense. Your intuition is very important here – if something doesn’t feel right about an order, feel free to look into it. Granted, you’re going to be paying for it if it doesn’t work out, so take the liberty to investigate. Some signs include a wonky email address, a name that doesn’t match an address, a location like “123 Main Street,” things of that sort – again, if things don’t look right…
Be proactive. That means you can call your customer, ask for a follow up email, or other strategies to help you prove that the order placed is, in fact, legitimate.
Hopefully this was beneficial in helping you to prevent credit card fraud. If you have any questions, we’re experts in PCI Certification, fraud prevention, and of course, all things ecommerce. So just let us know, we’re happy to help.
From me to you, happy selling!