Online Payment Protection Tips for Merchants!

Payment Protection Tips

When you run an online business, it’s your responsibility to keep the business secure, both for yourself and your customers. To handle various issues with payment gateway worldwide functionality, you need to take care. Here are the payment protection tips you can take to protect both yourself and your customers from the risks of online commerce.

PCI DSS and Other Strange Letters

While there are not so many global payment systems, they all do their best to avoid fraud and other crimes that always tend to happen where the money is. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is the list of requirements for merchants that work with cashless payments. No matter if it’s terminal payments at the desk or online shopping. It is a must for any bank, store, or any organization that accepts cashless transactions, at least once a year.

Some say this requirement is formal. But it’s to be taken as seriously as possible, given that it’s been developed by the world’s largest payment providers.

Choose Secure Payment Gateways

Not only should you as a merchant take care to comply with the PCI DSS requirements. You should also make sure that the partners you select take care too. Read what you can about the reputation of the potential partners. Study their requirements for partners. Choose those you can surely apply in your business.

Do you want to sell worldwide? Find the partner that enables you to, by the support of international transfers. Plan to sell big? Make sure large amounts can pass through the gateways with no delay. Ready to accept cryptocurrencies? You’ll need a special sort of gateway for that. And it’s all your responsibility.

Because, you know, customers never care about who you collaborate with. They leave their sensitive data on your website, and they want you to care about their safety. And if it’s compromised, it’s you they will blame. So, choosing the right partners is crucial.

Personal Data Must Not Flow

Secure payments are just a part of overall security. And, as it’s your site where customers leave their names and card numbers, you are supposed to store them securely. It is especially important if you want to make your KYC policy as user-friendly as can be, requiring customers to leave their data just once and then storing it in their profiles.

Being a victim of the crime is no fun at all, but being a partner in it (even unwillingly) may mean a ruined reputation. So storing your customers’ data securely should be the highest priority.

Protect Yourself from Chargebacks

One of the most popular ways of criminals using legal breaches in the system is chargeback fraud. Unfortunately, compared to other methods (stealing credit cards and identities, accessing dashboards, and so on), the chargeback crime is less obvious, and payment systems won’t take your side. Chargebacks, many of them fraudulent, consume a significant part of merchants’ revenue.

There are smart chargeback prevention systems that analyze transaction requests almost in real-time and do the following:

  • Provide enough information from the merchant to the customer to minimize the so-called “friendly fraud” (chargeback requests with no criminal intentions, caused by, say, forgetfulness or delivery issues)
  • Decline transactions that look suspicious due to the body of data (purpose, location, used device, time of purchase, delivery address, other details of the transaction)
  • Check specific details of the card and the purchase (for example, matching the delivery address with the mailing address of the card owner, checking the security code, and so on). This is, in fact, a variation of the previous measure, though quite efficient when it comes to detecting potential fraud using only a fraction of the total information.

The Human Factor

We don’t want it to be insulting for you, and we don’t suspect you by the very fact you’re reading this. Alas, there have been too many unfair merchants that fail to deliver the right purchase at the right time. So, to prevent it, you must grant the following:

  • Check the staff. Make sure no one can misuse the customers’ data.
  • Record who is granted access to any part of it. In case of a failure, you will know who is responsible.
  • Play fair with your employees. Don’t motivate them to violate the law, as it may seem to them, to restore the justice or to lay their vengeance upon thee.

Remember: your business and your customers’ security depend on the employees who make it all work.

There’s Never Absolute Safety

While these payment protection tips may sound basic, it’s the basic things where most failures happen. Share it on your social media pages to let your friends know. Or leave a comment if you have something to add to this. As there is much to add, we truly hope you tell us some story on your security and motivate others to act safely.

Payment protection tips article and permission to publish here provided by Muhammad Zayan. Originally written for Supply Chain Game Changer and published on April 22, 2021.