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The Fight Against Fraud

10/1/2009

Like to many companies with high-ticket items, Long Beach, Calif.-based vehicle accessory company Performance Plus Tire takes extra precautions to protect its online payment system from fraudulent activity.

The company, which has an e-commerce site, a catalog and one bricks-and-mortar location in Long Beach, Calif., offers its customers a variety of payment options for its products and services. Performance Plus Tire uses PayPal and provides shoppers with several credit-card payment methods.

However, the company still sought a 100% fraud liability solution that could also make the entire checkout process easier and more efficient for shoppers.

“We wanted a creative way to generate more business and a more secured way of getting paid,” said Hank Feldman, president of Performance Plus Tire.

After meeting with Chicago-based mPayy, an online and mobile payment provider, Performance Plus Tire implemented its secure debit solution. mPayy’s scalable payment platform now helps the company improve its margins by reducing fraud and transaction costs.

“We also chose mPayy for its speed of checkout,” Feldman added. “It’s important to give customers the best online experience, and providing these different, easy payments is important to appeal to all shoppers. Plus, if someone becomes frustrated during the checkout process and is faced with too many pages and clicks, they might abandon the site.”

Although many retailers are providing shoppers with alternative shopping methods, others have been slow to jump on board.

“I recently went to a conference that focuses on retail fraud and payment, and was shocked at how many big retailers are limiting their payment channels,” Feldman said. “Perhaps the larger companies are slow to react to adopting alternative payment options because they are more bureaucratic. Being a smaller business gives us that leading edge.”

mPayy’s secure debit solution is built around the mobile number and enables secure, convenient purchases and bill payment directly from customers’ checking accounts. Shoppers log into their accounts by typing in their mobile number—regardless of whether they are checking out via a computer or a hand-held device.

By logging into their mPayy account, shoppers can avoid typing their billing address, shipping information and credit-card number. And since mPayy already knows who its members are—it runs a background credit check on everyone with an account—it keeps track of who’s making a purchase with the retailer.

“Retailers don’t usually have an idea about who is entering a credit-card number during an online checkout process,” said Conrad Sheehan, founder and CEO of mPayy. “If the purchase turns out to have a stolen identity, mPayy would reserve against it and eat that money. Performance Plus Tire will always get paid.”

Performance Plus Tire accepts the orders online, confirms the inventory and invoices customers via e-mail for any of the tires, wheels or rims customers purchase each day.

mPayy’s e-mail invoicing also allows customers to complete the checkout process with a single click and reduce payment processing costs by half, as compared with other payment solutions available in the marketplace, Feldman said.

“Not only did we want another channel to direct customers to help us save money, but we also wanted a solution that was more user-friendly—and that’s exactly what we got.”

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