Now, we need to Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program. This comes in two parts. First, we need to use and regularly update anti-virus software. Then, we have to develop and maintain secure systems and applications. I know what anti-virus software is, so let’s start there.

Before we look into AV software, I want to give one bit of basic Internet advice. If you don’t know/trust a person or site – don’t download ANYTHING they send you if you don’t have AV protection. The most common method of catching a computer virus is still from opened email attachments. Most people have some anti-virus (AV) protection for their computers, but to be PCI compliant, we need to look into software that will protect every computer and device connected to the Internet through our network.

There are a number of companies that make anti-virus software, compile virus databases, and offer frequent updates. Most of these companies have PCI compliant versions of their software. The standard single-PC software will cost $50 – $75 for a year’s worth of automatic updates. Unfortunately, this level of protection, while typically excellent for home users, will not meet PCI compliance. Part of the reason for this is that PCI compliance requires that your AV software be able to monitor and generate reports detailing what viruses it has caught/contained. We need to look at the more robust offerings for business networks. The range of prices in this field is vast from $350 – nearly $3,000 yearly. The top end software is really more of an anti-virus “system” that protects mainframes and large networks, so we can breathe a sigh of relief and look a little lower on the price points. For covering a network with a few devices for one year, including unlimited updates, and support, the average cost settles in at about $500-$700.

The next standard, “Develop and Maintain Secure Systems and Applications”, requires a little more than picking anti-virus software that will meet your needs. Looking at the requirements to meet this standard, it becomes obvious that we either need to know our way around a network, or we need to get our networking expert back to test our network after each update, make sure that we have a separate part of the network used only for testing applications, and system monitors that watch our network. Because of the scope of this requirement, the next article will be devoted to addressing the various aspects of maintaining the security of our systems and applications.

Your company can be featured throughout the 2CO site for a full week including an image, a detailed description of the product(s) you offer, and a handy link to your own website. If you would like to become a Spotlight Supplier take a moment to send us an email with the following information:

• Your Name
• Your Supplier ID
• A 160 pixel wide by 144 pixel high logo/graphic
• A 200 word maximum descriptive/promotional text
• The specific product you would like featured, if applicable

We look forward to hearing from all of you.

“Online retailers are, according to Shop.org’s eHoliday Study, expecting increased holiday sales this year and, in preparation, are attracting bargain-hungry shoppers with free delivery.”

This is good news! After a couple years of worried customers and lagging sales, this comes as welcome encouragement. This also tells us that while customers are willing to spend money, they are still looking at price as a deciding factor. Offering your customers an incentive, like free shipping, to buy your product could be the deciding factor your customer needs to make that important decision to complete their sale.

Advertising is also taking a very affordable turn this year. More and more people are using social media to promote their websites. These avenues are usually inexpensive, if not free, and more popular every day. From the BizReport article:

“According to the survey nearly half (47.1%) of online retailers surveyed are increasing their use of social media this holiday season.”

Given the array of social media sites that cater to specific demographics (national, hobby, music, etc.) as well as the more generally popular sites like MySpace and FaceBook, you have the ability to reach either specifically targeted or a more varied customer base. You can reach them when they are looking to spend money, catch their attention, and sell them on your product – With free shipping for a limited time only.

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).

The Trysumer – “Freed from the shackles of convention and scarcity, immune to most advertising, and enjoying full access to information, reviews, and navigation, experienced consumers are trying out new appliances, new services, new flavors, new authors, new destinations, new artists, new outfits, new relationships, new *anything* with post mass-market gusto.” - Trendwatching.com

Spurred by an abundance of product, the internet, a higher demand for solid products and a general cynicism of name brands, TRYSUMERS are transient, experienced consumers who are becoming more daring in how and what they consume.

Where lack of choice and distribution channels in the past made it simpler to market and sell to prospects, today small business owners need to EARN the trust and credibility of this new breed of consumer by allowing them to TRY before they BUY.

Nike Trial Vans toured the UK/Ireland, France, Italy and Spain, stocking 1,000 of pairs of shoes. It was a free trial, no strings attached. To deliver on the crucial element of TRYVERTISING, total relevance of placement, the vans popped up in places where people actually ran. From athletic events to well-known running spots.

The Cons
Just like modern day dating – adding a trial step to your marketing system will extend the amount of time the sale takes and cost you more monetarily.

The Pros
Assuming your product or service satisfies the needs of your target audience, they will choose to buy from you rather than from your “caveman” competitor.

TRYvertising or introducing yourself and your products by letting people experience and try them out first is quickly becoming the new form of advertising.  This can take the form of a free sample or free workshop, a LITE version of a bigger product, or a 30 day trial.

Taking It Up A Notch

Strategic Product Placement

Ritz Carlton Hotels and Mercedes Benz teamed up to offer the hotel guests free use of their Mercedes CLS500.  Dozens of guests chose to buy the car based on their experience.

Similar success has happened by placing health and beauty products in boutique hotels.  Can you offer sample products or services at locations such as ski resorts, universities, festivals, spas, gyms, charity auctions, golf tournament, restaurants, etc?

Consider posting products on trial sites like thefreesite.com.

Professional Service Based?

Offer a free workshop, article or consultation as a gift to a strategic alliance.  They can give it away.  Last year at a 2-day conference, we offered to help members of an association to create their online directory listing.

Create articles and whitepapers and distribute online to sites like ezinearticles.com.

About the Author…
Cidnee Stephen is the owner of Strategies for Success – a marketing company that focuses on the needs of budget minded small businesses and professional services.  She has helped hundreds of small businesses get out of their peak and valley ruts to finally achieve that next vital level of success.  Cidnee is also a sought after speaker, writer and blogger on marketing topics that affect small businesses and B2B service based operations.  Subscribe for Free to her bi-weekly marketing tips for small businesses and also receive a special report on the 7 Steps of Marketing Success.

Originated from ancient China about three thousand years ago, a part of Feng shui, known as symbolism Feng Shui is the knowledge of placing good fortune symbols in proper position or direction of your home to harness the Chi which harmonizes the area of its influence, bringing about good fortune, good health, prosperity and happiness to the practitioner. Symbolism Feng Shui is very easy to apply and potent too.

We carry over 2000 Feng Shui enhancers, remedies and cures. Each of them is accompanied by information and Feng Shui tips which will help you to choose the proper products to energize your home or office.

Don’t forget to check out what the year of Tiger 2010 holds for you. How do the Chinese twelve horoscope animal signs fare and what Feng Shui enhancers and cures can help you make the most out of next year.

Buy-FengShui.com is having a year end MEGA SALES now. On top of that we have a wide selection of products with free shipping. We’re also giving away free gifts for a minimum purchase of $60. See you there and Happy Shopping!

Let’s Feng Shui Your Way to a Better Life!

Click here to visit Buy-Fengshui.com

Click here to apply to be a 2CO Spotlight.

With the recent state of the world’s economy, the industry is seeing an increase in fraud . Traditional fraud methods continue to be prevalent but there is also an increase in “friendly fraud”. With the Holiday Season in full bloom, fraudulent activity will be more apparent now than ever.

ACFE President James D. Ratley, CFE, said that the support of organizations around the world helps make Fraud Week an effective tool in raising anti-fraud awareness.

“Fraud continues to be a serious problem, and the state of our economy requires all organizations to be even more vigilant,” Ratley said. “Once again, we want to say ‘thank you’ to all of the Fraud Awareness Week supporters for helping to shine a spotlight on the urgent need for fraud prevention and detection.”

Not only is it important for businesses to be privy to internet fraud scams, but it is equally important for consumers to understand the risks and to learn what to look for when shopping. See this article, as I feel it provides a needed level of awareness for consumers.

According to the National Retail Federation, nearly half of consumers plan to use the Internet to purchase holiday gifts this year. But these shoppers need to be aware and prepared for a very real concern when surfing the Web — online fraud.

The internet provides a convenient outlet for additional shopping. The other side of that, of course, is that the internet also opens new opportunities for unlawful activity from all corners of the globe.

My hope is that this week of Fraud Awareness will turn into a daily awareness of the risks of, and opportunities for selling and buying on the internet. Be aware of some of the issues we discussed in this week’s articles in addition to our ongoing efforts of mitigating risk.

If you, the supplier, find an instance of fraud on your account that we missed, please cancel the transaction but also make us aware of the order. We analyze our data closely, and the more data we have, the more successful we will be at separating the good orders from the bad in the future.

On behalf of our Fraud & Disputes Department, I would like to wish you a happy and safe selling experience during this Holiday Season.

Sebbe

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.

Our vendor administration area has many pieces of information that should receive consideration when fulfilling an order. Among the information you should be taking note of is the amount of the purchase, the credit card used, the AVS and CVV responses, the language of the sales page, name, email, billing address, and IP address. When reviewing an order, be sure that the amount of the sale makes sense with what is being purchased. If a customer places multiple orders in a short period, pay attention to the card being used for each sale. If you notice many transactions being placed with multiple credit cards, this is a possible indication of fraud. American credit cards have built in security features such as AVS (address verification system) and CVV (security code on the card). Although our system captures this information, it is not always 100% accurate. You should not depend solely on these two pieces of information, as we can receive inaccurate responses. People move and the security code can be rubbed off the card. You should not base your decision on these two pieces of information alone. Use this information in conjunction with the other tools available to you to make your determination.

The information on the sales page can tell you a lot about the customer as well. The name, the email address, the language of the customer, the IP address, and the billing address should have some continuity. If you notice discrepancies between the IP and billing address, this can be an indication of fraud. Likewise, if you notice discrepancies between the name, email address, and language of the customer, this can be an indication of fraud. Keep in mind that in today’s world of business, it is common to see discrepancies between these pieces of information. Please consider all of this information when you receive our fraud review. We strongly advise that you do not fulfill services until receiving our review. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that our review is 100% accurate. You know your business and customers better than we do, so it is important that you review the orders as well. If at anytime, you feel that we have made the wrong decision, or you would like a second opinion, please contact us and we will be pleased to conduct a manual review.

2Checkout has matured with the evolution of fraud. We continue to compile various tools for you to use. Utilizing the tools available to you can help differentiate between fraudulent and legitimate orders. As long as you consider all the information when fulfilling services, you should be able to mitigate losses due to fraud. The importance of keeping your insult rate low cannot be overstated. Allowing legitimate business is far more important than catching every fraudster. You can contact us 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We are here for you.

By Jamal and Nathan

A vendor selling PC to Phone services was being targeted by a fraud ring. This type of fraud is very tricky to catch. The orders appeared to look legitimate. The card BIN, billing addresses and I.P. addresses all matched. What tipped off the fraud analyst to further investigate this, was the spelling of the customers’ names, name placement, and the frequency of the orders. Most orders had a French I.P. address, but there was one with the I.P. of Côte d’Ivoire. This one mistake led us to believe this was fraud coming out of Ghana. Using some deeper methods of fraud detection such as Device Identification, we were able to connect the orders to each other.

Intervention:

• We added the vendor account to our Fraud Monitoring program.
• The Fraud Monitoring Program is a program developed to provide a magnified look into the account. We monitor vendor accounts who receive fraudulent orders regularly missed by our internal-automated Fraud System. Accounts that we see fraud chargebacks come in where the system approved the order/s. Representatives within the Fraud Department are assigned a list of accounts where they check the account daily, review the last day’s worth of sales to ensure the Fraud System didn’t approve orders it shouldn’t have. In the cases where we do find a fraud order approved by the system, as long as we are monitoring daily, we will have caught it within 24 hours. We can notify the vendor, and take corrective action. This provides an additional level of protection for our suppliers.
• The orders that are determined fraudulent are canceled before the funds have a chance to deposit.
• Weekly reports are generated and shared between the account analysts and supervisor to determine the program’s success and what other steps should be taken.

Results:

• We caught fraudulent orders that were previously approved and canceled them. We added those orders to our negative database. Adding the information attached to the order allows us to manually review new orders with identified fraudulent information. This process makes it harder for the fraudster to make repeat purchases using the same information.
• Creates a barrier from the fraudsters targeting one vendor with multiple orders with different information.
• Lowers the Vendor’s fraud chargebacks
• Frustrates the fraudsters into moving on.

Nicole and LaShona 2Checkout Disputes Team

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.

Fraud types and the likelihood of fraudulent activity:

Supplier A is providing a virtual private network or VPN service. A VPN service is both an intangible service and easily accessed long before the legitimate cardholder is likely to notice this fraudulent transaction, making this service a prime target for fraudsters. Knowing that this service is highly likely to attract fraudulent activity, we will be more prepared and inclined to contact the customers to provide a more in-depth review of the customer before reaching a conclusion.

Friendly fraud:

Unfortunately, everyone is at risk of friendly fraud. A VPN service, however, is less likely to receive this type of fraud than a vendor providing a product or service of a more personal nature such as dating or adult products. Friendly fraud is also the most difficult type of fraud to catch, as the correct information is generally listed on the order. The customer is more likely to report this as fraud if they do not recall the purchase or issuing a charge back instead of requesting a refund. Suppliers should keep records of the order, communicate with the customer, and save any other pertinent information to aid in disputing these charges when the time comes.

How can we minimize the risk to the vendor and the overall results?

The best advice that we can offer to any vendor is to be proactive with their own orders. Review any order, even briefly, to look for discrepancies listed on the vendor page or the information listed within their own system that we may not be able to access. If a vendor is suspicious of an order due to the discrepancies they find, or for any other reason, we encourage them to research it further. One of the most readily available tools around is the internet, and there are several helpful tools that are free for anyone to use. Google maps will help you know if the address listed is a home, business, or even an empty field thanks to the satellite images. The directions feature is also quite useful, letting you plot the distance between the billing address and the IP location. An IP location 500 miles away from the billing address tends to be a bit more suspicious than one within 50 miles. Another useful tool is whois domain tools this lets you check where an IP is coming from or search on an email domain to find out additional details. Is this an established business that has been around for years, or was the domain just created recently to appear legitimate? There are countless tools available to anyone if they wish to search for information about a customer. Our vendors are also more than welcome to contact us by emailing fraud@2co.com through our ticket system or by calling 877-294-0273 to express concern. We will take an additional look into the order with any new information provided. Once a vendor is aware of the types of fraud that they receive, they are more likely to understand and locate the types of fraud that they may be getting.

The world of fraud is ever changing and while we would like to say that we can prevent every instance of fraud, this is unfortunately not the case. Only by working together will we be able to provide the most effective protection.

Mike and JR – Fraud Department

All types of e-commerce companies have dealt with friendly fraud at one time or another. Within the past few years there has been an increase in deliberate friendly fraud. There are a few factors that have contributed to the rise in deliberate friendly fraud; such as the shape of the economy worldwide, individual financial situations, and consumer’s knowledge of how to take advantage of the banking system. Unfortunately, the economy can impact a person’s financial stability which can cause this type of deliberate fraud. What someone can afford today, they may not be able to afford tomorrow. This can lead them to drastic measures to hold on to any funds they have.

Another type of friendly fraud are fraudsters that regularly manipulate the system to get their products for free. Since these fraudsters are constantly finding new ways to use the system to their advantage, there is no real way to avoid this type of friendly fraud from happening. Basically the only thing that can be done is to try to protect your business as much as possible.

Accidental friendly fraud is when the consumer mistakenly disputes a charge and doesn’t take the incentive to rectify the situation. In many cases it can be helpful to contact the customer directly to give them additional information about the charge and the product or service that was purchased. Accidental friendly fraud can be easily fixed. Once the consumer realizes they made the mistake, they remedy the situation. The following suggestion may help to avoid this type of friendly fraud. If your business uses a reseller, a payment processor, or any type of third party billing service; such as 2Checkout.com, PayPal, Clickbank, WorldPay, or Google; it is very important that your customers are aware of this. Placing this company’s information on your website and on your receipts will help customers recognize the charge on their billing statement. An additional feature available to 2Checkout.com suppliers is the use of a “soft descriptor”. Each supplier can enter their own “soft descriptor” to be included within the description sent to the credit card companies when a credit card is billed.

With all of this in mind, before you send a product or provide a service to a customer, make sure you know the customer. If you don’t know them or are skeptical, use the tools on the internet or any other tools made available to you in order to screen the customer. You may request that the customer fax information to you such as their photo ID or a utility bill. Additionally, you may contact the Fraud Department to request that 2Checkout.com require additional documentation from the customer before providing the item(s) ordered.

These preventative methods may lower the chance of receiving a fraud related chargeback. However, even with doing all of this, there is really no way to predict cases of friendly fraud. It is a good idea to prepare your business for these special cases. The best way to prepare is to keep all documentation about the customer, the product/service that was provided, and any contact you have had with the customer; as these may be needed to challenge a chargeback. Some examples of documentation you should retain are:

• Proof of Successful Download
• Proof of Product Usage (Login, IP, etc.)
• Signed Terms Of Service/Contract
• Signed Proof of Delivery/Delivery Confirmation
• Tracking Pictures of Shipped Products
• Detailed Description of Product

Since there is no real way to stop this type of fraud from happening, a good business practice is allocating funds to offset any possible losses due to all types of friendly fraud. This can help ensure your business continues to grow while you are trying to recoup the loss of funds from the chargeback. All online companies spend time and money looking for fraud, but fewer companies spend enough time gathering the information required to fight friendly fraud. As this is “Fraud Awareness Week” we decided to take this opportunity to remind you that friendly fraud is out there and can negatively impact your business. With all of this information, you can be better prepared to fight friendly fraud.

Amanda and Leona – Disputes Department