Kick Criminals off Your Electronic Commerce by Managing Your Payment Processing

Are the bad guys out to get your electronic commerce site? What seemed like safe ground with online shopping is generating increasing consumer doubt, says a study from Indiana State University, and the findings may lead you to take a closer look at your electronic commerce payment systems.

Electronic Commerce Leaders Not Immune to Threats
Even industry leaders in electronic commerce may have the potential for criminals to swipe your customers’ information for illegal use, according to the report. Team members from Microsoft also participated in the report. You might be surprised to learn that CAAS (cashier as a service) systems, which are commonly used for online purchases, could be setting up a breeding ground for challenges between the way payment systems and electronic commerce platforms function.

All the Ways to Trick You…
The bad guys can essentially fool your system in several methods. They can send payments received online to illegitimate sites. They can change the cost of your products to register as free or no-charge, and receive product without paying. It all comes down to problems within the integration between electronic commerce platforms and payment systems, say researchers.

The Key Lies in Payment Solutions
CaaS checkout systems take place between multiple entities, opening the door, say researchers, into the possibility of more areas of fraud existing in the more high-tech payment solutions. The area of concern many experts note – a mismatch or lack of communication between your payment solution and electronic commerce provider – can be remedied, in part, by an environment built on stronger collaboration. If you are a provider of a payment service, you can help educate your merchants on how to best utilize your safety features. As a merchant using a payment service provider, it’s critical that you learn how to most efficiently manage your payment solutions.

One example you should note is that a criminal could modify the payment notification system for a site’s electronic commerce to re-route a payment directed at one ecommerce merchant to actually manifest on another ecommerce site – such as a fake site a criminal has built for that purpose. While the funds go to the criminal, the payment notification goes to the real site without anyone knowing.

Managing Electronic Commerce Fraud Is Advancing
A tool to investigate is Fraud Score from Volusion, which helps you know if an order might be fraudulent before it’s processed. Fraud Score can wade through 100 million prior events to help you know if the order is from a live card holder instead of a criminal, and can verify more than 15 data fields to find patterns that go along with bogus orders. The software gives your administrative panel a score of viability for each order, and uses a color-coded scale to assign one of three risk levels to an order.

Accertify Inc. also offers fraud-stopping solutions, including one that has been used by top electronic commerce retailers, called Interceptas. This tool can tell you if transactions have a source within their IP address or geographic area that is linked with high probabilities of fraud, and then you can set rules that will kick out these transactions or send them on for other types of review. It can also stop criminals from using promotions more than once by changing their IP address or giving you a made-up domain name.

Learning From Electronic Commerce Leaders
The top electronic commerce retailer Amazon was noted by researchers to have the potential for security breaches, but then took steps to remedy the risk with software code designed for rapid, real-time payment notifications.

You can follow suit by closely exploring your payment notification system, paying particular attention to how those payment services are integrated. This can be a complex issue, so look for a payment services software vendor that will guide you along the process and help provide tools for analysis. Taking the steps that will uncover your own potential security threats may be cumbersome at first, but you can’t put a price on the customer satisfaction and loyalty the measures can deliver.