I recently put out a call asking for people to share their best business resources. Could be anything…a newsletter, website or blog you turn to for marketing inspiration or a time-saving tool you use everyday. I plan to turn those responses into a series of posts on this blog-with a link to the respondents’ websites and a little about the business if you like-about what real businesses feel are their best resources. If you would like to share your most helpful resources with me and our readers, please email me or leave a comment here and I will respond. This is the first post on this topic.
One of the first responses I received was about a topic on the minds of every small business that sells online-order fraud. Unfortunately, this is a widespread problem and one that is likely to burn every ecommerce webmaster sooner or later. I broached the subject of identifying and preventing order fraud in a previous post, but here is the experience of one of our clients who wished to remain anonymous, and the tools they use to combat the problem of fraudulent orders.
“Identity theft is a real concern for us. Early in 07 we learned the hard way how to avoid being victims after we shipped three orders worth about $800. Two out of the three were delivered, we had UPS do an intercept of the third package worth about $300. As you know there is a flag system for detecting if a transaction may be suspicious. One of the most helpful resources is the white pages for reverse phone number look up. Out of the services we have tried their listings seem to be the most complete, even if it is a cell number, the city and state is listed.
“Another resource is used for IP look up that shows the customer’s general location. [Vanessa's note-this is a free service.] Our credit card processing company, Authorize.net, lists our customer’s IP number on each transaction, from there we can plug that into the IP look up and see the location of our customer. Location is everything! Once I detected a fraudulent transaction…the customer’s “bill to” address was Michigan, the “ship to” was Miami. By looking up the IP location I found that the person placing the order was in fact in Columbia.”
It’s likely you aren’t checking every single order that comes through your shop, but when you do get that feeling that something’s not right or perhaps you conduct a random check, these tools can help you avoid being a victim. What do you do to help decrease the incidence of online order fraud?
