3 Payment Issues Business Owners Need To Be Aware Of

Although technology continues to develop and we’ve got more payment options at our disposal than ever before, there are still challenges and issues that need to be overcome when taking online payments.

In 2022, $41 billion was lost as a result of online payment fraud. It’s estimated that this figure will reach $48 billion in 2023.

Fraud is just one of the challenges facing business owners today. This shows why you need to be diligent and put measures in place to ensure your business and your customers are protected.

To help you get a better understanding, we’re going to take a look at some of the main payment issues business owners need to be aware of, so you can put provisions in place to reduce risk.

1. Payment Issues & Fraud

As we mentioned fraud in the introduction, this is a logical place to begin. Payment fraud is any type of illegal or false transaction carried out by a cybercriminal.

Payment fraud can be characterized in three ways:

1. False requests for a return, refund, or bounced checks
2. Stolen or lost merchandise
3. Unauthorized or fraudulent transactions

Today, e-commerce companies depend on electronic transactions to charge customers for services and products.

As there are more electronic transactions than ever before, there is now a greater amount of fraudulent activity being carried out.

A whole host of different tactics are utilized, including:

• Merchant identity theft – This involves a cybercriminal setting up a merchant account on the behalf of what appears to be a legit company and charging stolen credit cards.
• Wire transfer and advanced fee scams – Criminals will target e-store owners and credit card users by asking for funds in advance in return for money or a credit card at a later date.
• Pagejacking – Hackers can re-route traffic from your e-store by hijacking part of it and then sending visitors to another website. The unwanted website could contain malicious material that cybercriminals use to infiltrate a network security system.
• Identity theft – Identity theft happens outside of the digital world but it’s a common type of online fraud. A hacker will steal someone’s personal data and utilize it under false pretenses to engage in identity theft.
• Phishing – Any sites or emails that require private or personal data, such as login credentials, bank account information, or a credit card, are prone to phishing. If the source is unfamiliar, this could be someone attempting to steal information. Of course, the issue is that cybercriminals are incredibly advanced today and so they make it appear that they’re emailing you from a trusted source.

Businesses need to put methods in place to monitor payment fraud so that they can act quickly and effectively.

There are three things you need to monitor to detect payment fraud:

1. User sign-up – This is the first moment whereby you can log the data a user has submitted. This is critical because you can check whether their data matches up with your digital footprint analysis.
2. User log-in – At this point, you can confirm whether the person logging into the account is the same person who signed up for the account. This is imperative because it helps to prevent account takeover (ATO), which could result in transaction fraud.
3. User transaction – Users will pay during the checkout stage, which means they’re probably going to be entering their payment information for the first time. You can gather a wealth of data here, which you can check against the information you’ve accumulated so far.

Choose a reputable and reliable payment fraud solution that can help you to monitor important data and spot anything suspicious or unusual as efficiently as possible.

2. Chargebacks

Another payment issue that businesses need to be wary of today is what’s known as a ‘chargeback.’

Chargebacks can ruin brand equity and create excess costs. This issue is worrying to the extent that some businesses have found themselves needing to close indefinitely because of an excessive number of chargeback claims.

A lot of business owners don’t factor in chargebacks when planning their finances nor do they consider how this will impact their payment processing fees.

Of course, a chargeback in itself isn’t an illegal activity. If a customer hasn’t received an item or they feel they’ve not gotten the service they were promised, they may dispute a transaction.

However, chargeback fraud is a problem. Often referred to as friendly fraud, this happens when a user fraudulently tries to secure a refund by utilizing the chargeback process.

Rather than bringing up the possibility of a refund with the merchant, the consumer goes straight to the bank to initiate the chargeback process. They will falsely claim that they never received the product or that the product they received was defective. In some cases, they may state that they never even authorized the transaction.

No matter what the reason may be, chargeback fraud happens when someone tries to get a refund under false pretenses.

To fight back, it’s a good idea to look for new tools that can help you to locate user behavior patterns such as Quantum Metric so you can determine when a transaction does not reflect typical purchase activity. This could indicate that a cybercriminal is trying to utilize the user’s payment source.

Shutting down such transactions before they happen is a great way of proactively limiting chargebacks.

3. Increasing Compliance

Last but not least, when you consider the issues discussed above, it’s not hard to see why there’s an increasing amount of regulation being imposed on businesses around the world. This only gets more complicated if you sell to customers outside of the country.

Special compliance issues come to the fore specifically for online payments that cannot be found elsewhere, including essential technology certifications, like PCI, and the continued escalating of regulatory requirements.

This can leave businesses feeling confused about what all of these regulatory issues mean for them.

• What do you need to do to make sure your business isn’t fined?
• How can you make sure you’re always up-to-date with new regulations?

These are questions you simply need to answer!

If your business is found to be in a compliance breach, you’ll face significant fines. Not only this but if the issue becomes public knowledge, which is almost certain, it can significantly tarnish your reputation.

As we all know, trust is very difficult to build, but it can be destroyed in an instant, with severe consequences for any business.

We’d recommend following online industry sources so that you can stay up to date with the changing regulatory and compliance landscape, enabling you to make intelligent decisions regarding your online payment processes.

Forums, networking groups, publications, and blogs cover compliance topics so that you never miss a beat.

You may also want to consider using the services of an online payment security team who can handle this for you. After all, there are so many different types of legislation that need to be considered today. This includes AML compliance, GDPR compliance tools, PSD2 compliance, KYC compliance, and much, much more.

If you don’t have effective resources in place to ensure compliance at all times, you could easily find that this ends up falling by the wayside.

Instead, with the help of industry professionals who live and breathe payment compliance, and spend every day staying on top of everything that’s happening in the industry, you can have peace of mind knowing that this is being taken care of by a team of experts who truly understand what’s required to be compliant.

Protect Your Business by Dealing With Payment Issues Head-on

One thing businesses cannot afford to do today is be reactive. You need to get ahead of the game by ensuring you have effective methods in place to safeguard your business.

The first step is to acknowledge the different payment issues your business faces. Once you’ve done this, you can then put together a strategy that enables you to reduce risk and respond quickly.

This should not be a one-off task. After all, the landscape is changing all of the time, so you need to continually monitor risks and put in new provisions to protect your business and your customers.