With change in time, the process of buying and selling has also seen some drastic changes over the last decade. While going to a store, browsing and buying what you need has always been a way for customers to get the products they need, with the advent of ecommerce, several new doors have opened. A number of companies now exclusively sell their products online, through the internet and mobile platforms. Established brick-and-mortar establishments have also scurried to include online availability of their products in their service offerings, and buying online is now a very common phenomenon.

Digital purchases have increased to a level where brick-and-mortar shopping has gone down significantly in the past few years. In fact, sales over the internet and mobile platforms are all set to grow even further over the next few years, and projections indicate around 125 billion transactions per year by 2018. In such a state where face to face credit card transactions are decreasing on a daily basis and companies resorting to the services of secure payment processing solutions to receive their funds, there is an increasingly disturbing trend of card not present chargebacks that has come to the fore. If you offer your products and services online, it would be a great idea to opt for a secure payment option that provides you with adequate protection against such chargebacks and related fraud.

Why Do I Need Protection Against Chargebacks?

Every half a minute, global ecommerce sales generate an excess of a million dollars. In these circumstances, it is as important for businesses to protect themselves from any kind of fraud as it is for customers. One of the most commonly seen kinds of fraud is card not present fraud, in which a company might be charged back for a transaction when the card used for the transaction is not a valid one. There are also many instances of transactions of friendly fraud where customers will actually initiate a chargeback process even after legitimately purchasing a product. To counter these instances, you need to select and use the services of a payment gateway that has enough measures in place to offer protection to your business.

What Protection Measures Should I Look For?

To sufficiently guard against fraud, you need to ensure that your payment processor has adequate measures in place to offer you protection. This can come in many forms, all of which are essential to look after the different entry and exit points at which fraudulent activity can occur. This means that you have to cover a lot of ground before you can be sure about things. Here are a few things to watch out for –

Dealing with Friendly Fraud – Friendly fraud occurs when customers use the chargeback service in an illegitimate manner to secure a refund. Some of the things you can do to bring down the chances of this happening is to ensure that you have customer-friendly practices in place, and ramp up your customer service to create better satisfaction. You can also use delivery confirmation to prevent certain kinds of chargebacks and implement additional security measures with your payment portal.

Eliminating Merchant Error – Merchant error is a common reason why chargebacks happen, and it would be good for your business if you do everything you can to eliminate merchant error in your transactions. Ensure you have the right return and cancellation policy and try to ship the product before you charge a particular card. Also, it is always safer to check your processing procedures to ensure that only approved transactions get processed.

Avoiding Criminal Fraud – You can easily avoid criminal fraud if your payment processor has some kind of identity validation mechanism in place for the shoppers. You can also use third party fraud detection and affiliate fraud protection services to cancel out some of the usual ways that criminal fraud happens in a ecommerce context.

Following these tips, you can run your business in peace without having to worry about fraudulent chargebacks.