7 E-Commerce Fraud Prevention Best Practices

Fraud poses a significant threat to businesses and consumers in the e-commerce space. As the e-commerce industry rapidly expands, reaching an incredible $5.55 trillion in 2022 alone, the risk of scams, leaked customer data, and stolen payment information will only get worse.

It’s more crucial than ever for online businesses to take fraud prevention much more seriously. Here are seven best practices that can help protect your company from fraud.

1. Conduct Regular Site Audits

Security audits should be a staple of your company’s fraud prevention practices. If your operations include an online portal, then conducting audits of your website can help keep your customers and your company in the clear.

Security audits allow you to get ahead of criminals by probing the strength of your website’s defenses. Checking for vulnerabilities in your code or contracting a third-party auditor to take a deeper look can reveal significant threats to data and account access, giving you time to secure your site before criminals take advantage of it.

2. Invest in Training Employees

All of the best practices in the world can still fail if employees are poorly trained to handle threats. Customer-facing staff members must be properly trained to recognize fraud risks and handle them effectively. Without adequate instruction, your team members are susceptible to fraudulent schemes intended to take advantage of inexperienced service reps.

3. Be PCI Compliant

Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance is notoriously complex to manage in-house, prompting many companies to turn to established payment service providers. However, if your business handles customer payment card information directly, it is your responsibility to adopt the right security measures, remain PCI compliant, and keep valuable information safe.

Criminals often target e-commerce businesses that handle payments natively, hoping to find vulnerabilities. Adopting the standards defined by the PCI Security Standards Council can be an effective deterrent for these kinds of crimes.

4. Require the Credit Card Verification Value

Although criminals may be able to access stolen payment card information, they do not always know the card’s verification value (CVV or CSC). In most cases, only someone holding the physical card can supply this detail.

Requiring customers to provide the card’s verification value can dramatically reduce the risk of fraudsters making purchases with stolen payment card information.

5. Use Address Verification Services

In addition to verifying that a customer has their card with CVV, businesses can also ensure the customer’s billing address matches what is specified for the card’s owner. An address verification system (AVS) can do this with relative ease. This can help prevent scammers from using fraudulent identities since the information they provide is unlikely to match up.

You can also work with a postal address validator to ensure the delivery address is legitimate. Some online retailers avoid shipping to PO boxes or using freight forwarding services, which can also thwart fraudsters.

6. Get Proof of Delivery

Given the remote, contactless nature of e-commerce transactions, proof of delivery is a critical means of ensuring items arrive at their destinations on time and in an acceptable condition.

Typically, proof of delivery takes the form of a signature or a photo of the package on the customer’s doorstep. It’s a powerful piece of evidence that can help protect businesses from return fraud, which is when a customer claims they never received an item in order to get a refund.

7. Use ID Validation Solutions

ID validation solutions can serve as an automated, tamper-proof check during the onboarding and sales process. By validating IDs, you can actively discourage fraud while ensuring your customers feel safe enough to purchase with confidence.

With Intellicheck, your e-commerce business can validate large numbers of IDs without suffering any dips in speed or accuracy. With subsecond results, customers can speed through the onboarding process and quickly complete their purchases. Intellicheck’s solution can be deployed in minutes via a standalone web portal or carefully integrated using a full-featured API. Request a demo to see how Intellicheck can protect your business today.

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