10 Eye-opening Tricks to Wrap Your Shopping Store with Fraud Protection

If you run an e-store, you should hardly be reminded how important it is to keep it secure. Cybercrime, viruses, fraud and other security threats populate the web and target those e-stores that are under-protected. Customers also fear their sensitive information being stolen and rely on the presence of trust signals when choosing which e-store to trust.

If you’re not sure whether your store is fraud-proof to the fullest, you’ll find this article useful. Today, we bring you a checklist of 10 crucial tricks to wrap your store with fraud protection. Make sure you follow them all before you lie back and let your e-store work for you.

• Tip #1: First of all, if you’re just starting out with your e-store, you have to stick to an e-commerce engine that’s intrinsically secure. The programming language it uses should be complex and object-orientated. To land with a least vulnerable e-commerce platform, consider going for Magento or PrestaShop. Moreover, for these engines, you can find some of the most secure and feature-rich PrestaShop and Magento templates in the market.

   

  Download/Buy Magento 2 Templates
  

  What’s more, after you launch your store, make sure that its admin panel is inaccessible to public and attackers. For this, change the standard /admin URL to a custom one that contains both characters and numbers. For even stronger protection, install extensions that enable two-step authentication.

• Tip #2: Secondly, you’ve got to make sure that your store delivers safe online checkout. Your e-store should meet PCI DSS, the set of worldwide-accepted security standards enforced by some big cheeses of the financial world, such as Visa, Master Card, American Express and others. The vital part of sticking to DSS is purchasing an SSL certificate and swamping the insecure http for https. With SSL technology every transaction in your store becomes way more secure, as this technology authenticates the transaction participants, encrypts the transmitted data with a cipher and ensures that the data cannot be altered along the way.
• Tip #3: Verifying addresses and cards is a standard practice nowadays. By asking for verification number provided on the other side of the card, you ensure that you’re transacting with the actual cardholder and not with someone who just stole the card number. By verifying the billing address, you ensure that the address customer provides coincides with the one stored for the credit card. These two simple checkups let you filter out fraudulent checkout attempts.

• Tip #4: Then, another fraud protection trick is comparing IPs of the customers to their billing addresses. For example, if the credit card has a U.S. billing address and the purchase is made with a German IP, there’s a reason to be double-cautious and use additional means to verify the transaction. Additionally, it’s recommended to restrict checkout for IP addresses, for which you don’t offer shipping.
• Tip #5: Don’t store sensitive information in your database. Storing your client’s credit card numbers, CVV2s and expiration dates is prohibited by PSI standards. By storing this information you give attackers a chance to steal the details and later use them in fraud crime.
• Tip #6: It’s often the case that scammers use software to brute-force card numbers one by one until one of them works. You can bring this type of fraud to an end if you limit the number of declined transactions by a single user. Let’s say, you can set up your e-store the way that it bans the suspicious user after they enter incorrect credit card details for 5 times. What’s more, you can implement the same restriction, applying it additionally to malevolent IPs.
• Tip #7: Be highly alert managing refunds. Look for any suspicious data that hints that the person asking for monetary compensation is not the one who actually made the purchase. Moreover, check for stolen Purchase IDs, suspicious IPs and for peaks in refund attempts. Collect customer signatures if this helps. All this prevents you being fooled into giving a smooth refund to someone who hasn’t spent a buck.
• Tip #8: Use high-profile security extensions that track suspicious transactions for you. Consider going for a fraud profiling service that combats frauds by means of analysis and profiling. What’s more, you can both exterminate risks and boost customer trust by going for a ‘trust mark’ security service. Services, such as Truste, Verisgn or McAfee Secure, daily track vulnerabilities and help you identify problems quickly.
• Tip #9: Take advantage of device fingerprinting. This method of fraud detection proves extremely effective and is achieved with the help of device fingerprinting extensions for different e-commerce platforms. These extensions analyze a number of properties, such as location, browser, operating system and language. They let you stop fraud at its root by timely identifying all fraud attempts and blocking the users involved. Notable examples of device fingerprinting services include Simility, Riskified, Signifyd, Sift Science, etc.
   
• Tip #10: Last but not least, you’ve got to regularly update your website engine, template and extensions. Moreover, you can partially automate this process if you go for a template that updates automatically. For instance, you can tap into the inventory of templates with auto-update feature by browsing the collection of business Magento themes.

Wrapping Up

Congrats! Now, you know what the rules of thumb to follow to wrap your store with fraud protection are. Stick to them and you’ll keep your store far away from any fraudulent and suspicious activity. We wish you good luck in making it to the top with your e-store.

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