5 Proven Ways For Ecommerce Fraud Protection

ecommerce fraud protection online store payment scam prevention

One of the many challenges that online merchants face is ecommerce fraud. The evolution, growth, and popularity of online commerce has created an avenue for ecommerce to thrive. Online entrepreneurs end up losing substantial amounts of money through the criminal act. According to the Harvard Business Review, a major reason why this problem has persisted is the sophisticated ways that fraudsters use to gain access to online spaces of unsuspecting online business owners. It’s for this reason that it’s important to pay much attention to ways of preventing ecommerce fraud. It’s better to keep fraudsters at bay instead of having to deal with the consequences of their actions. 

Here are 5 proven ways of preventing ecommerce fraud. 

1. Regular Website Audits 

Regular website audits are vital for checking the security status of your website. This is how you can check whether there are any flaws on your site. Fraudsters maximize on flaws to gain access to ecommerce websites to commit their fraudulent actions. Therefore, it’s essential to discover any existing security flaws before fraudsters do. There are a couple of things you can do to ensure that the security of your website is intact. One of the actions you can take is to make sure that the software and plugins you use are regularly updated. Updating software and plugins will ensure that your site remains protected. 

Moreover, it’s wise to continue backing up your online store as often as possible. In case of a problem, you can always retrieve important information and keep your site functioning. It’s during moments of system failure that fraudsters can take advantage to commit ecommerce fraud. Therefore, it’s significant to keep on backing up your store’s information for security reasons. Another way of auditing the security level of your website is checking the passwords you use for admin accounts. A valuable security tip is using strong passwords to make it difficult for criminals accessing your accounts. 

Scan your site for malware on a regular basis. If your site gets attacked by malware, it makes it possible for fraudsters to access it for malicious reasons. It may cost you dearly if you allow your site to be vulnerable to malware. Thus, it’s valuable to audit your site for malware that fraudsters can take advantage of to commit ecommerce fraud. 

2. Constant Monitoring Of Your Website 

Constant monitoring of your website is another proven way of preventing ecommerce fraud. Any suspicious activities are a red flag. You should take action against any activity that looks suspicious to you. With this in mind, it deems it necessary to have a good understanding of your online store. You can only notice suspicious activity on your network if you know how your online store works. Fraudulent transactions succeed if the malicious activities of fraudsters are not discovered. Check out for things like inconsistent information from your customers. This should give you an alert that something suspicious is happening. 

Build a habit of constantly monitoring your online store for any malicious activities. This will go a long way to reduce the cases of fraud on your ecommerce platform. 

3. Use Anti-Fraud Solutions 

As you already know, fraudsters use sophisticated means to gain illegal access to your ecommerce platform. As technology continues to grow, they devise ways of setting up their activities in a way that’s hard to discover. For this reason, you should shift your focus to quality and superior tools of preventing fraud. You’ll prevent ecommerce fraud by making use of proven and quality anti-fraud solutions. There are software tools that work as anti-fraud solutions for ecommerce brands. You can choose from available options depending on your budget and unique needs. 

You’ll also need to consider the amount of resources and effort required in installation and management of these solutions. You can have a team from your brand working on installation and management of the software or you can hire experts to handle the job. Either way, anti-fraud solutions are a perfect and viable way of preventing fraudsters from committing fraudulent activities on your online store. 

4. Ensure That Credit Card And IP Address Match 

Another sure way of preventing online fraud is checking whether the credit card customers use to make purchases and IP addresses match. Ideally, whenever an order on your store happens, it originates from a particular and unique IP address. From the IP address information, you can tell the city and region where the customer comes from. 

Once you have the IP address information, check whether it matches the credit card’s address. If they don’t match, this should tell you that something isn’t right. 

5. Insist On Card Verification 

You can protect your online shop from falling into the hands of fraudsters by verifying the cards used in each transaction. Usually, there are security codes on the back of the cards that customers use to make purchases. For example, at the back of VISA and MasterCard credit and debit cards, there is a three-digit security code you can use to verify the authenticity of a customer. Also, there is a four-digit security verification code on the back of American Express cards. 

As an online merchant, it’s prudent to demand that all the people purchasing products from you verify the legitimacy of the transaction by providing the numbers on the security codes. This means that your customers should be having the physical cards with them so as to provide the respective numbers. This goes a long way to maintain safety and minimize the possibility of fraud. 

Fight Fraud

Fraudsters know that ecommerce is growing at a fast rate and that is why they are using sophisticated ways of attacking online business owners. This practice isn’t going to stop because of the nature of the online space. Therefore, the best thing to do is develop effective ways of preventing fraudsters from succeeding in their plans. Understanding what ecommerce fraud is and how it works is an important step in stopping it

The next thing is to make use of the proven practices that help to limit attacks of fraudsters on online sellers. Do your part the help prevent or minimize fraudulent e-commerce activity!

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