Many online payment services can process your payments real time. This means that your customer is still on your site as if he were in a normal brick and mortar store. This is especially great if you have a business that sells software or if you are an online gaming site. If you are selling items that are physically shipped to an address then it is of less importance since the processing time of the payment is negated by the shipping time anyway.
Unfortunately real-time order processing als requires pre screening of orders and this is something that not all processors do. That means that if the credit card is verified, the order is processed and the “customer” immediately gets his subscription for example. You, will only find out the transaction was fraudulent once you get notified of the chargeback. At this point the service is already rendered. The AVS service does a check on the address to match against their file on record. But with online and virtual products the fraudster won’t care if the address is correct. The item won’t be shipped anyway. Therefore you have to make sure to use good fraud screening services. They will help you decide whether or not you want to accept an order. They are designed and customized to ensure that fraudulent transactions are filtered and good transactions are still processed normally.
If you are shipping physical products and also have international customers then caution is always advised. As you can imagine, a fraudster will always ask for an alternative shipping address, because he obviously doesn’t live at the same address as the card holder. Always make sure you are dealing with a legitimate customer. Try to get as much information as possible if you have a suspicious feeling about a transaction.
As mentioned in previous posts, online fraud is rapidly increasing. It is time to seriously think about how you want to implement your fraud prevention in order to maximize your sales. No business is happy with chargebacks and too many of them can get you into serious financial trouble and possible have your payment facility revoked.
fraudshield.wordpress.com 