Growth in eCommerce has continued steadily for years. Amazon may lead the way, but today businesses of all sizes operate and sell, at least in part, through an online presence. Unfortunately, with this convenience for your customers comes cybersecurity risk. As you ramp up your eCommerce activity, make sure your payment gateway can protect your customers and your business from online fraud.
Verify Card Information
Every credit or debit card has a CVV code printed on the back. This consists of either three or four digits, and helps ensure that whoever is making an online purchase has the physical payment card. Requiring this through your payment gateway helps prevent two different kinds of fraud. First, it allows you to reject payment attempts by someone without the card, so a stolen number will not be enough. Second, by allowing you to verify the card's presence, it helps reduce friendly fraud from cardholders who might claim not to have made a purchase.
Verify Purchaser Information
The CVV code helps, but it cannot prevent fraud by someone who has stolen a physical card. Your payment gateway should therefore also verify that the billing address and zip code match those of the cardholder. Similarly, they should use the IP address associated with the device used to make the purchase. If the information entered in those fields do not match the cardholder's information, the gateway should deny the transaction.
Flag High-Risk Purchases
By confirming the information entered for the card and for the cardholder, your gateway can reduce the potential for fraud in many instances. Unfortunately, though, data breaches occur regularly. Sophisticated bad actors infiltrate organizations' systems and extract and sell off all the data someone may need to run massive levels of fraudulent transactions.
This is where your payment gateway must be more sophisticated. The checks above screen out incorrect information on attempted online payments. Even if all the information is correct, though, you can still screen out many instances of fraud through algorithms developed to help secure payments. These will consider additional factors like the amount of the transaction, discrepancies between billing and shipping addresses, and country of origin for transactions. By flagging suspicious activity, your payment gateway can detect improper payments before they go through.
A Moving Target
Any system that relies on static information to protect you and your customers will fail. It may not happen today, or even tomorrow, but eventually criminals will find a way around any single mechanism. To keep you safe, your gateway should receive cybersecurity updates and patches regularly. The algorithms should change over time. This kind of moving target can help keep someone from figuring out and taking advantage of how you do business online. To keep yourself and your customers safe from fraud, make sure your gateway is up to the challenge.
