My Merchant Account Blog

Vetting the Transaction - Calling Your Customer

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Calling your customer to verify the transaction is another way to help prevent fraudulent transactions: Reducing Fraudulent Transactions in ECommerce with the Quantum Gateway, Some Ways to Help Internet Merchants Reduce Fraud and Chargebacks, Preventing Online Fraud, and Fighting Fraud in your E-Commerce Store. However, this takes time and sometimes a lot more time than the product is worth, but you want to do everything you can to prevent a chargeback (Chargebacks Are Not Worth Fighting). The customer might not be at home when you call or the product might be a gift for a member of the household and you might ruin the surprise if you speak with the wrong individual. Plus, who is to say you will actually speak to the cardholder.

Phone Verification Products

There are some products available to merchants like Prove Out, Telesign, Onverify, Phone Confirm, and Telephone Verification from MaxMind. These products can help verify the phone number and they will usually take into account the area code and the billing address to see how close these two numbers are. For example, if the billing ZIP code is 90210 and the area code is 212, the merchant might want to look harder at this transaction to see why these two numbers are about 2,800 miles away.

Unfortunately, most of these products have to be added to the checkout process and this can cause problems at times. The response from the product might lag, causing the customer to re-enter some or all of their checkout information again. The merchant might lose the sale.

Fortunately, the Quantum Gateway took this into account when building its product. They added Dial Verify right into the electronic payment gateway - allowing the gateway to handle the process. This also reduces the amount of development the merchant needs to add as well.

All these extra security features can be considered to fraud and chargeback prevention tools that the Fortune 500 companies (the "big boys") are using at no extra costs to the merchant.