By Matt Hoggett, founder of Prezzee
As many retailers know, security and fraud protection is serious business, with online transactions becoming the ideal playground for hackers to poach consumer credit card and personal details en mass.
Each day over 1 million new malware hacks are released onto the web with the retail industry coming in as the second most targeted sector after finance. Despite security providers continually improving their defenses, hackers continue to improve their skills just as quickly. Staying on top of your security is an essential part of today’s business.
You can protect your customers and business data by taking some basic precautions.
Setting up your ecommerce business is reasonably easy these days with a number of solutions providing end to end website, hosting and transaction space . Build and host your online store with a secure ecommerce platform from one of the larger SAAS providers, such as Shopify or BigCommerce, who are continually improving the security of their customers websites.
If you’re hosting your own ecommerce site, stay on top of security updates to avoid automated web crawlers gaining access to your website via unpatched security vulnerabilities. This is one of the easiest way you can protect yourself and sadly one of the most common mistakes that small businesses make – make sure all of your software patches are up to date.
Protect your customers and business from sniffing and impersonation attacks by requiring SSL access to ensure you website data is safely encrypted between web server and browser. SSL security is essential for ecommerce, it ensures financial and personal data is protected throughout the purchase process, and also builds trust for your online store while giving your shoppers additional peace of mind.
Hackers often gain access to websites via brute force attacks. Attackers work by randomly entering combinations of letters into the login, hoping to get lucky. You can protect against this type of attack by requiring your customers to have a complex ‘strong’ password.
There are a few signs that you’re under fraud attack – being able to identify the flags will help you take quick action. Keep an eye out for common combinations – email names, domains, order history and obscure international locations. Ensure you have the right address linked to your customer by using an Address Verification System (AVS), which verifies the credit card billing address against their bank records. Keep an eye on your high value item purchases. We’ve found that fraudsters will often target your high value products which are often shipped to overseas addresses, where it very difficult to retrieve missing stock.
Registering your business name and domain protects against fraudsters planning to knock off your brand and steal your customers – a simple cease and desist letter has you protected by law. Protect your business identity, name, website and domain under trademark to ensure no one else can use your company name, domain and logo.
How Prezzee follows the above …..
Prezzee has found having multiple layers of protection against attacks and fraud is the best and most effective practice, as no one particular layer is a catch all.
We built our proprietary system to catch ATO (account takeover) Fraud and brute force attacks. We also use third party solutions like “Stripe” as our payment gateway which utilises tokenization to secure the credit card details of which Prezzee does not ever see or store. Stripe also has in built payment fraud protection system which we have also integrated with. We also use “Sift Science” which uses machine learning to look at hundreds of metrics and behaviours of each order through our system all in a fraction of a second giving us a score of the potential risk. Lastly we also ask our users to verify their emails and mobile numbers via a SMS 2FA which is also check against a global dataset of mobile numbers.
About Prezzee
Prezzee is an online marketplace for digital Gift Cards – an innovative Gift Card solution built to change the art of gifting. Prezzee was designed to solve the problem of losing or leaving plastic Gift Cards at home when you needed them the most. With the FREE Prezzee App, you can buy, send, store and redeem digital Gift Cards at the click of a button.
Choose from Australia’s leading retailers and never miss an opportunity to redeem a Gift Card again! A beautiful user interface means sending Gift Cards feels special and personalised making Prezzee the perfect solution for Gifts
