Great, so your site is ranked number 1 and 2 for all the keywords you can imagine. In fact, you get 2,000 orders per day with huge margins. Hey, your sitting back and enjoying the good life, aren't you?
A problem, that is all too known by sites that rank well in search engines, is credit card fraud. It starts off small, a few orders here and there, small order values and then all of a sudden your reaping in the dough with large orders from all over the globe. Your sitting happy, right? Not when you receive your merchant statement with all the charge backs for goods you shipped out but never received payment for.
Credit card fraud is an issue and even with the best payment gateway solutions, you still need to use some common sense before shipping out an order. This was the topic at the new E-Commerce forum at SEO Chat, a thread named credit card fraud - how do you handle these?.
One member offered their advice based on four years of online retail experience. This member stopped shipping to countries outside the US and Canada. Why? Not only because of real scams, but as he explained "because they do not understand that they have to pay customs and sometimes don't want to pay the taxes that their governments want."
In addition, when the order seems a bit shady or is unusually large in value compared to the average order value of ones store he "would call the customer (if it's the wrong number we're pretty sure that it's a fraud and cancel the order) and ask for the bank phone number. And if it's a huge order, we would ask them to fax over their driver's license and credit card number over to us."
He also says, "99.9999999999% of the orders from Nigeria, Singapore, Indonesia, and some of eastern Europe are fraud."
Make sure to check out the thread for more tips.
