How to Accept Online Payments at Lowest Fraud Risk

Managers of online businesses need to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the risks accompanying the processing of e-commerce transactions, so that when the business begins to accept online payments, it does that in a way that greatly limits risk exposure. Moreover, this should be achieved prior to the setting up of a credit card processing account for the business, even though the manager's education will never actually end.

Where to Start?

The e-commerce manager should start with the designing of a reliable plan for dealing with fraud risks. The single most important objective throughout this process should be to ensure that transactions are processed on the website not only quickly, but also at the highest possible level of security and reliability, and to do so every time a payment is accepted at the checkout. How well this objective is achieved will actually be known quite quickly, through the comments you receive from your customers.

If visitors to your website believe that their personal data is kept safe, they will respond in a quite short order and, among other things, you will notice that you get positive reviews on in the blogosphere. On the other hand, if these comments are negative and the issue is not properly addressed, this will lead to disputes and eventually to chargebacks, which will cost you a great deal of time and money, as well as the cost of the service or product itself. Not to mention that you can get your merchant account terminated.

How to Accept Online Payments at Lowest Fraud Risk

Now that we have reviewed the reasons why you should pay attention to data security, here is how your payment processing should be done to limit your risk exposure:

• The importance of education and training. The level of your organization's risk liability will be very much the result of your company's established process for managing sales orders, evaluating transactions for fraud, data security management and, finally, the type of merchandised offered on your website. Your entire staff will have to be well educated on the risks associated with the acceptance of payments over the internet and everyone within your organization must be well prepared to manage them.
• The importance of selecting a good payment processor. When evaluating the details of a merchant account proposal and putting it against others you have been sent by a host of other processing banks, an e-commerce manager will have to be able to cast his eye beyond the main rates. Although very important, these rates are usually only applicable under certain pre-defined conditions. One has to make sure the business' payment acceptance procedures are compliant with industry rules, which is the best way to ensure lowest processing cost.