Securing Your E-Store During the Holiday Season
By Greg Smith, president & CEO of Accudata Technologies
The holiday season is right around the corner, and you know what that means — shopping, upon shopping, upon shopping! This is a great time for any e-retail business, but are you ready?
According to Forrester Research, approximately $248.7 billion online sales are expected to occur in the U.S. throughout 2014. It’s also predicted that 30% of consumers will begin their holiday shopping before Halloween and 26% beginning on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With so much activity occurring, keeping your business fraud-free is key!
These easy-to-implement, handful of tips will get you ready and keep you safe throughout the holidays:
Encrypt, Encrypt, Encrypt
Whether storing phone numbers, email addresses, tax information or invoices, encrypting data will help protect businesses and their customers. Even if the information is lost or stolen it will be protected and inaccessible if there is an encryption system in place. To add another level of security, change passwords regularly and don’t use the same password for all accounts. The combination of encrypted data and ever-changing passwords on all accounts will make it much more difficult for a hacker to access the data.
Verify Customers’ Identity
Having technology in place that verifies customers’ real identities during the checkout process is an added step to help avoid fraud. Verification services, can help with this by validating a customer’s identity through their phone number. Once a customer enters their phone number in an online or in-app form, it is run through a database to access information about them, such as their name and residential address. In a matter of seconds, the business can check to see if they match helping small business to be proactive and prevent unnecessary fees and fraud.
Utilize Card Verification Methods (CVM)
Because most credit card fraud is the result of a stolen credit card number and not the theft of the card itself, there is a simple way to stop many fraudulent transactions. A card verification number (CVM) is assigned to every credit card. The CVM can be three or four digits and can be on either the front or the back of the card. The CVM is not embedded nor is it encrypted in the magnetic stripe that contains the actual card number. Therefore, a thief who only has the credit card number won’t be able to complete a fraudulent transaction when asked to supply the CVM.
Customize Your Database
Incorporate a flagging or alert system into your database software so that you can easily see if there has been an attempted fraud in the customer’s past. Items to flag include chargebacks and previous refunds. Compare every new order received with the information already in your database, which should include as much information as possible about each customer, such as the customer’s name, shipping address, billing address, phone numbers, returns and chargebacks, customer complaints, etc.
Holidays are a time of joy and a great opportunity for e-retailers to make a profit! Don’t let pesky cyber-criminals bring you or your customers’ holiday spirit down. Practicing these key fraud protection strategies will keep your business safe and you worry free.
Greg Smith is president and CEO of Accudata Technologies, which provides flexible access to data validation through innovative approaches to data transmission.