Colt Passey (EVP of Business Development)
Nexio
The payment industry is constantly evolving. What’s true today wasn’t true last year and might not be true next week. Security standards, bank regulations, and fraud are just part of that. It’s a sad fact that every year, 82% of retailers are expected to experience fraud – with the card present, or without. It stings every time. You lose the product, the cost of shipping, the money you should have been paid, time in both fulfilling the order and challenging the fraud, and the icing on this particularly terrible cake is usually an irritating chargeback fee. It’s an eternal balance. If you spent every waking hour trying to understand all the ways that sinister individuals might attempt to steal from you, you wouldn’t have any time left to run your business. That’s before you even begin to think about the logistics of keeping your transaction processing up and running with redundancy! So, how do you manage? What tools can you use to ensure you’re not pouring resources into a bottomless time sink, while still managing to keep your bottom line safe? Can the complex world of protecting your payments possibly lead to growth?
Thankfully, there are ways to combat these challenges. There are many payment tools that help keep merchants safe and up to date while providing them additional opportunities to increase their bottom line. So, let’s talk about security. 3-Domain Secure (3DS) is an increasingly relevant tool for both card-present and card-not-present transactions. It has become so integral to merchandising that some nations have made it a mandatory upgrade to all transactions within their borders. You know, the really small nations with few people — like India. With a headcount just shy of 1.4 billion people, that’s a significant enough market to warrant at least a cursory investigation, right? 3DS will help make inroads in such markets while adding little burden to the consumer. It adds a simple, secure additional step: An additional password or one-time authentication code sent to the customer’s registered email address or phone number. This addition can reduce fraud from stolen cards to near-zero. Not only would a potential criminal need the card, but they would also need the unlocked phone or email details of their would-be victim. This minor step at the checkout ensures your customer knows their stolen card can’t be abused in your web store.
Fraud prevention tools are your next port of call. There are many different providers out there to suit the scale of any digital business, but there are commonalities between them all. The most basic of the basic will offer you some simple machine learning tools that will run transactions through risk appraisal without need for supervision. They will seek out potential fraud patterns; and, if transactions fit into their defined parameters, cancel them wholesale. Of course, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. If your business caters to clients who frequently travel, the basic tools might incorrectly interpret that the transactions are coming from a wide variety of IP addresses, or outright deny service to certain blacklisted countries. Advanced security measures will help ensure your customers can pay you safely.
The next piece you want to have in place is to establish redundancy with your merchant account to prevent transactional issues with your sponsoring bank or payments processor. This can be a great way to build positive relationships with processors and financial backers as you strategize where and how payments process. Redundancy is critical when tailoring services to industries that are subject to additional scrutiny, such as CBD-related products.
Ensuring that your checkout is up to date, with actively updated security, and having redundancy measures is mandatory for eCommerce. It’s not just leaving money on the table to allow your online security infrastructure to crumble, it’s putting those potential profits right into the pockets of the people who’re trying to rob you in the first place, or simply sacrificing sales to red tape.
Don’t let a lack of support hurt your bottom line.