by Cidnee Stephen

Marketing to a prospect is like dating, especially if your prospect is a ”trysumer.”

For those of you who are experiencing marital bliss let me remind you of this age-old, sometimes confusing, but always entertaining ritual.

Back in the caveman days dating was easy.  The caveman hit the cavewoman over the head and dragged her home – a behaviour that still exists today in the form of annoying telemarketers who won’t take no for an answer, or people who corner you at a business function, and try to shove their business down your throat.

Luckily we have evolved and the dating ritual has become less painful, but - let’s face it – more expensive!  Now more time and yes, more money has to be invested before a date (or prospect) is going to become involved with you (or your business).

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Fraud is prevalent in all Internet transactions, especially when the product is intangible. We have been in this industry long enough to see significant growth and development. We have also been here to see the growth and development of fraudulent activity. We would like to remind you that it is important to utilize 2Checkout’s fraud review. We have the advantage of state-of-the-art software and a knowledgeable staff with 35 years collective experience. In addition to our fraud review, we encourage you to utilize the information made available to you in the vendor administration area. We would like to give you some tips on how to recognize legitimate orders while preventing fraud.

While it is important to mitigate fraud, you want to be sure that you are not inadvertently denying legitimate business. With the current credit card system in place, we are not as protected as a traditional retailer is. Because we are working in a “Card Not Present” environment, chargebacks will occur. We have found on average, 12% of your orders may appear to be suspicious, but only 1% will end up being fraudulent. It is very important that you don’t insult the 11% legitimate customers just to catch the 1% fraudulent customers. While working with digital products, losses are less formidable because there are no shipping fees and no items to be lost. The following information will help you to differentiate between legitimate customers and fraudsters.

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One of the more challenging issues we have to work around involves new vendors. While we do have a wealth of knowledge and experience relating to the various types of fraud, it can prove somewhat more problematic to link this knowledge with a new vendor. First, we must understand our vendor and the aspects of their business that may be at risk of fraudulent activity.

Types of customers and fraud:

With all new vendors, we must start from the ground up. From the moment our partnership begins, we attempt to assess what types of customers our vendors will be receiving. For the purpose of this study, we reviewed one of our new vendors and will now refer to them as “Supplier A“. In the case of Supplier A, several discrepancies were located in each order placed through their system. We noticed discrepancies between the billing information and the IP addresses, as well as discrepancies within our internal tools. While not unusual to find orders with these types of discrepancies, we did find that each new order placed had very similar discrepancies. This made it appear that the same person or group was attempting to circumvent the fraud review process and get by undetected. When we noticed such a large percent of Supplier A’s orders with these same discrepancies we then proceeded to take a higher level of caution with all new orders reviewed. It appeared that the trends changed slightly, receiving orders with matching billing addresses and IP addresses but suspicious email addresses as well as substantial and consistent discrepancies within our internal tools. This may have been the work of the same person or fraud ring placing the original orders, but it is also possible that the vendor was being hit by other fraudsters.

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This week is International Fraud Awareness Week. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) has information and resources that can be used by anyone to combat all types of fraud.

“This weeklong campaign encourages business leaders and employees to proactively take steps to minimize the impact of fraud by promoting anti-fraud awareness and education.”

Share your ideas with us this week in a series of articles that will help define different types of fraud, highlight 2Checkout’s role in fighting fraud, and what we can all do to reduce the amount of fraud. By working together and communicating our ideas we can make online shopping safer for both customers and merchants.

Smashing Magazine has an article that shows common website usability problems and ways to avoid or fix them.

“The goal of user interface design is to make a website easier for visitors to use. For online stores, fixing problems brings in more visitors who browse more products for a longer period of time. Even simple fixes, like not requiring registration for purchases, can have a huge effect on your bottom line. Keep these common problems in mind the next time you design an online store. Your customers will thank you for it.”

Having visited a large number of sites in my time on the Internet, I have to agree with the observations as well as the remedies.