How to Prevent Online Fraud and Save 99% of Your Revenue in 2018

Who minds having an extra income on the side?

No one does, that’s for sure. So, I decided to launch a store to sell my handmade wallets half a year ago. That’s my hobby, so why not?

I've built a store with one of TemplateMonster’s Magento themes and peacefully went to bed to wake up next morning and find out that I became a victim of online fraud.

To my surprise, locking the doors and checking my closet for a stranger didn’t help to keep my wallets safe and sound. Someone used a stolen credit card to pay for my handicrafts. Guess who became responsible for a chargeback…

I wish I knew about eCommerce fraud prevention back then. But I didn’t and became so frustrated that I even wanted to shut down my store head-first. So much time and efforts were in vain.

I had to sacrifice many things to get my side business off the ground. Lack of sleep on weekdays. No fun on weekends. I dropped the gym. My friends seem to start forgetting the way I look. And my private life…

I won’t make fun of myself by going into details, but believe me, it’s bad.

What about my wallets?

I don’t crank out third-rate items that look alike and hackneyed. I take an individual approach to each wallet to make sure no one will have a similar design besides the person who buys it (and probably Will Smith if he’s lucky enough). Before crafting a wallet, I do extensive research. I look for creative ideas, mix them, weed out the bad ones, search for new ideas, drop some of them again… The whole process lasts really long.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention one more thing. Although I run my business online and don’t pay a rental, it doesn’t mean I have no operating expenses. I pay for a website domain, promotion, and maintenance. Materials for wallets cost money as well. I avoid cheap crap to provide the best value for customers and build a reliable reputation.

Just imagine how upset I was to find out that some greedy shithead got the best of my items and rewarded me with nothing but a headache and nightmares.

OK, I’d better stop moaning like housewives from soap operas.

Shit happens.

A lot of merchants earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, and no fraudsters stop them. Let’s face it. While we have something to steal, there’ll be jerks who’ll try to steal it. Last year, 15.4 million Americans became victims of fraud, a 16% increase from 2015. I’m terrified at the thought of how much this number will increase in 2018. But other successful merchants don’t seem to fret about that at all. I had nothing to do but ask Google for advice on how to prevent credit card fraud.

I had nothing to do but ask Google for advice on how to prevent credit card fraud.

In a while, I came across a thread on Quora, where some guy advised an anti-fraud service dubbed Signifyd. The first thing that crossed my mind was that it would only bring me more trouble than actual results. I’m not one of those geeks who get the hang of new technologies on the fly. That’s why I was quite skeptical about this fraud detection solution at the very beginning.

What caught my attention was a simple principle of work. As a store owner, I send order details to guys from Signifyd, they screen them for risk factors and send me back a risk score and a detailed explanation. Quite easy and clear, right? Let me share some other Signifyd benefits that influenced my final decision in its favor.

Get Started in Minutes

This eCommerce fraud protection service is perfect for merchants pressed for time. I could set up Signifyd in minutes. It’s a true miracle for such a slowpoke like me. I didn’t have to bring any changes to the eCommerce platform empowering my store from the inside.

There are plugins for Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce stores. For other scenarios, you can use fully documented APIs providing fast integrations.

User-Friendly Case Console

Signifyd has an intuitive, well-organized console, which gives access to all the orders in one place. It’s quite convenient. I remember using a service to manage my product inventory and had to switch between multiple screens all the time. That constant switching was so annoying and took a lot of my time. I often lost sight of the necessary data and did more clicking than product managing. The console of Signifyd relieved me from constant jumping here and there.

The info about every order comes split into 3 sections, namely Addresses, Device, and Email. On the top of each section, there’s a bar indicating the risk level.

Red is used for a high risk, green for a low risk, and gray for cases when the analysis doesn’t impact the risk level too much. What also matters in online fraud reporting is the bar length. The longer the bar, the more your analysis results impact the risk level.

In-depth Order Analysis

Signifyd analyzes a lot of signals to determine whether transactions are secure or fraudulent. They include device fingerprints, IP geolocation, proxies, issuing banks, velocity, social graphs, search engines, public records, cross-merchant blacklists, and a large network of sellers. With so many factors taken into account, results of the fraud analysis are trustworthy. If I tried to analyze so many signals on my own, it would blow my mind.

No human brain can handle them all as quickly and accurately as this fraud detection system does.

Automatic Order Fulfillment

If you are lazybones like me, you’ll definitely enjoy the feature of automation like I did. To fulfill my orders, I don’t even have to lift a finger. The system can do it for me automatically so that I could spend more time on my wallets.

Don’t get me wrong. Fraud management is still under my supervision. I enabled an option to receive a fraud alert to my mailbox every day.

Chargeback Compensation

Here’s probably the best thing about Signifyd. With this service, fraud is not my problem anymore. When someone commits a fraud, guys from Signifyd fully cover all the transactions they approved. They pay back for both a chargeback and shipping within 48 hours. Where else could I make such a risk-free investment?

Where else could I make such a risk-free investment?

What’s Covered

Signifyd covers chargebacks related to the stolen financial information and account takeover.

What’s Not Covered

Signifyd covers chargebacks related only to their own mistakes. They don’t compensate for errors made by merchants, card processors, and shippers. For example, there’ll be no reimbursement of broken or undelivered items, unprocessed refunds, duplicate charges, etc.

Fair Pricing

When I learned about so many opportunities, I got an impression that I’d have to pay a fortune for this fraud prevention service and go broke in a month or two. But no. They charge only 1% of every order that I get paid on. 99% of my revenue is totally mine. If an order is ranked as fraudulent and I reject it, I don’t pay a dime.

I used the Complete Assurance plan, but you can also consider a few more options:

I started using this fraud detection software a few months ago. Since then, I’ve spent nothing on chargebacks. My wallets are safe, my piece of mind is back, and I can finally enjoy my side business with minimum operational costs.

My store also had an increase in revenues from international buyers. The thing is guys from Signifyd approved a lot of risky foreign orders that I would decline. Pretty cool, right? If there is a case of fraud, that's not my problem anymore. This is the sphere where I can be selfish without feeling guilty.

Fraud protection services like Signifyd are relatively new advances on the market. A lot of your friends and colleagues may not know about them and still suffer from fraudsters. Share the post with them on social media to secure them against bad guys in the cyberspace.