For consumers, the holidays mean buying all the items our loved ones have wanted all year, and receiving all those great gifts we’ve wanted but would not buy for ourselves. For online store owners, this can mean record sales year after year.

And just one credit card fraudster can ruin the holiday season for both a consumer and an online store owner.

There are quite a few steps you can take to market your store for the holiday season. As the traffic comes in, what are you doing to protect yourself from the wrong people ordering your goods or services? Here are a few precautions you can take to prevent the headaches associated with online credit card fraud:

1.) Manually check your orders. Fraudsters take advantage of different ship to addresses during the holidays as well as the number of orders that change addresses mid-delivery. If you get an order shipping to an address in an odd location or a large order, be sure to call the customer prior to shipping.

2.) Be sure to check the IP address where the order was placed. If you find that it doesn’t match any city on the order, you should be cautious before shipping. This post on protecting yourself from chargebacks includes a screenshot of what the IP address looks like on each order record in a Volusion Admin Area.

3.) Be aware of countries that tend to harbor internet fraud. High problem areas tend to be China, southeast Asia, India, the former Soviet Union, the Eastern block of Europe, and East Africa. If you see an IP address from one of these countries, shipping the order might not be worth it unless you can contact the customer and verify the card.

4.) Prevent credit card fraud in the first place by hosting data securely. A survey by CyberSource speculates that online credit card fraud has gone up in 2007 by 20 percent already. Be sure to protect credit card data by complying with PCI/CISP standards. This will greatly reduce your risk of getting your servers compromised and your customers’ credit card information stolen by hackers. You can see if your hosting company is compliant by checking Visa’s list of CISP certified hosting companies (don’t worry–Volusion is on the list!).

Enjoy your holiday sales this season, but don’t forget to prevent the post-holiday hangover by taking the steps to prevent chargebacks.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Credit Card Fraud, Holiday Fraud Statistics, Internet Fraud Holidays, Preventing Credit Card Fraud, volusion

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In this recent American Express ad, John McEnroe comes to an epiphany that credit card “dispute resolution” is easier than he’d ever realized. The commercial ends with McEnroe hugging after resolving a tiff with Klauss Umlauf, his former nemesis and referee at the U.S. Open. The announcer then reminds us how easy it is to resolve credit card disputes with American Express. Unfortunately for merchants, disputing a charge really can be that easy for customers. That is why merchants should take every precaution to be prepared for them should they arise.

According to Wikipedia, here are reasons customers ask for a chargeback:

· Card holder requests a copy of the transaction receipt.
· Card holder did not authorize the transaction.
· Non-matching account number.
· Transaction was processed more than once.
· Transaction receipt was not imprinted.
· Refund not processed.
· No authorization.
· Customer never received merchandise/services.
· Card not used within valid expiration date.
· Services not rendered.
· Error in transaction amount.
· Transaction receipt is incorrect, incomplete, or illegible.
· Transaction processed for incorrect amount.
· Product different from what was described or promised.
· Counterfeit transaction.
· Transaction not processed within Visa or MasterCard time frames.
· Failure to obtain card-holder signature.
· Signature on the card was blank.
· Signature on receipt different from card.
· Card-holder never authorized transaction.
· Card-holder claims merchant changed transaction amount without permission.
· Merchant knowingly participated in a fraudulent transaction.
· Incorrect Transaction Date.
· Card-holder claims invalid mail or telephone order transaction.
· Card-holder was denied ability to return item.
· Transaction was not canceled successfully.
· Card-holder not satisfied with quality of product or services

As you can see, there are many reasons why a customer can request his or her money back. As a merchant, you probably realize that customers are not always being honest or fair when asking for chargebacks, so it is important to cover your bases in case you are hit with a potential chargeback.

John Conde of sitepoint.com laid out the chargeback process like this:

1.) A customer disputes a transaction by contacting the bank that issued the card.
2.) The card-issuing bank researches the claim to see if it is valid or not. If not, the customer is responsible for the charge.
3.) If the claim is valid, the issuing bank offers the customer a provisional credit. The bank then takes the issue up with the merchant’s processing bank.
4.)The merchant’s processing bank then researches the chargeback on their own. They can decide to decline the chargeback and send it back to the card-issuing bank.
5.) The chargeback amount is removed directly from the merchant’s account and the merchant’s processing bank provides written notification to the merchant.
6.) If there was a processing error that was not the merchant’s fault, the sale is presented back to the card-issuing bank for corrections.
7.) The merchant provides documentation to remedy the chargeback. If this documentation is satisfactory, the chargeback is declined and the customer once again is charged for the sale. If the documentation is unsatisfactory, the chargeback is successful and the process ends.

In addition to taking the steps to prevent chargebacks covered in our blog previously, you can also ensure that your phone number is on any receipt or packing list, and that you respond to chargebacks or return requests as quickly as possible. This will ensure that you stay under that standard maximum of one to two percent that allows you to still use your merchant account.

Interested in more data about merchant accounts in general? Read our blog post that explains how payment is processed on your site.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist

http://www.volusion.com

Chargeback Process, Chargeback Processing, Chargebacks, What is Chargeback, volusion

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It’s a disease plaguing the entire world. You can guard against it, but inevitably it always finds you. It finds you and then it gets worse over time. Eventually, you become less bothered by it, merely accepting it as an annoying problem that will never go away. This acceptance only makes it worse. Your inbox will never escape…

Spam.

Since you need customers to have a way to easily reach you, you need a way for them to reach your email from your website. Unfortunately, this also leaves you open to spambots, which in case you live in a cave and haven’t been hit already, are electronic message systems that indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. Although the programmers who create spambots lie somewhere between slime molds and fungi on the evolutionary tree of life, we haven’t been able to stop them yet. The responsibility to prevent spam altogether stands with you, the merchant.

How can you encourage customers to email you with any questions they have without getting pummeled with spam? Here are three basic steps:

1.) Do not list your email anywhere on your site, especially as text. Spambots can pick up text and before you know it, that email box will be chock full of all sorts of offers you never wanted.

2.) Instead of including this email address, include a “Contact Us” page on your website, and on this page, include a form for customers to fill out with their questions. You can then direct that form to your inbox. If you have a Volusion store, there is a sample form for you to use under Design Website text.

3.) Include a CAPTCHA with your form. A CAPTCHA makes it much more difficult for spambots to work and requires the user to verify a code before posting anything. This prevents auto posting that could occur on your site. If you have a version 5 Volusion site, a CAPTCHA is included on the sample form.

A CAPTCHA looks like this:
Please enter the following code in the box provided:

CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Essentially, it is a test that a computer can generate and grade but cannot solve. Since you can require a CAPTCHA on your “Contact Us” page, you can help prevent electronic messaging systems from using this form and subsequently inundating you with spam.

Spammers will always find a way to make their money, but taking preventative steps to stop them should clear up your box for the emails you actually want to receive.

In order to setup your CAPTCHA form on your Volusion site, follow these three steps:
1.) Go to your store administration section.
2.) Go to Design > Website Text
3.) Find Article 83. You will see the verification code there. Simply copy the line of code for the verification tool, and paste it at the end of your HTML form.

-Michelle Greer, Volusion eCommerce Consultant

Technorati Tags: Captcha Form, Captcha ASP, Form Spam, Stop Spam Form

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Was your last order placed by an honest consumer impressed by your goods or a scammer who bought that credit card number from an internet chat room? Are some of your customers buying goods off your site but insisting to their credit card company that they didn’t? Internet fraud costs merchants millions of dollars a year, but taking these steps can help reduce the risk of chargebacks.

1.) Require a card security code on your checkout page.
There are different names for this code, but it consists of the last three digits on the back of most credit cards or the four digits on the front of an American Express card. There are many ways to steal credit card information, but requiring this code for every order can prevent the use of many of these numbers on your site.

2.) Do not process payment for an order until you have reviewed it first.
It seems much simpler to authorize an order and accept payment at the same time, but this gives you the chance to confirm that it is safe to process the order before capturing funds. If the shipping address is different from the billing address, you can call the customer’s billing phone number to confirm the order.

3.) Check the IP address where the order was placed.
If you are currently a Volusion customer, you can check the IP address for an order within the order record itself. It is located just under the customer number. You might want to call to confirm the order with your customer if the IP address state does not match the billing address state.

4.) Ask your gateway about their fraud protection services.
Some gateways allow you to set up filters that crosscheck customer data for you. If you get a lot of orders or don’t have a lot of time, the extra fraud protection might be worth it.

5.) Require a signature upon delivery.
This may not be a practical option for smaller transactions, but for larger transactions, it could be worth the expense.

6.) Use accurate product descriptions and require that your customers agree to “Terms and Conditions.”
It can be very easy for a customer to claim that they were misled on your site, but some simple idiot-proofing can save a lot of explaining to credit card companies. You can add “Terms and Conditions” to your Volusion site by adding a custom field to your checkout page.

-Michelle Greer, Volusion eCommerce Consultant

Technorati Tags: reduce chargebacks, prevent chargebacks, online credit card fraud, credit card fraud protection

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1. What is SSL? SSL (secure sockets layer) is an industry standard protocol used to encrypt data transmitted between a browser (customer) and a server (hosting provider for an online business) to prevent deciphering by a third party. 2. How does it work? The process is quite detailed and technical in nature. The basic components are: A] a greeting, in which the browser and server exchange encryption options and agree on a method for that session, B]

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