E-commerce has been a big deal for a while now, but with the heavy reliance of virtually the whole world on online shopping, trading, and other forms of business transactions that happen on the internet, there is a higher level of risk involved with running and maintaining an e-commerce website. This is the reason why you need to make sure that your e-commerce platform is totally protected at all times. The major threats to your business are online scammers. According to a survey carried out in 2016, online scams have increased by more than 25%- American Express. With more people having access to the internet, your E-commerce site is also open to a higher probability of being a target of a scam. This kind of problem is compounded even more in the month of black Friday and Cyber Monday.

You might be wondering what fraud on your e-commerce website is all about. There are many situations that are regarded as fraud in the e-commerce space. Some of them include

• Business E-mail compromise (BEC): This type of scam involves successfully attacking a verified business with the use of email and other systems of digital communication
• Identity theft: some internet fraudsters could make use of a stolen or a totally made up identity to carry out transactions on an e-commerce store.
• Data spill: In this case, sensitive information is stolen from the server of a company like an e-commerce store for instance, or even from various customers and the stolen data would be used for fraudulent activities.
• E-mail Account compromise (EAC): In this kind of attack, the email of a customer is compromised and then that email is used to purchase goods on an E-commerce website.

There are several other types of cyber frauds that could affect your E-commerce store, but the important thing is knowing how to prevent those attacks.

Ways of preventing cyber fraud

Security updates

When setting up your E-commerce store, there is a likelihood that you already opted for an SSL certificate to offer data encryption and domain name verification and choose multi domain SSL certificate to save extra cost. However, apart from simply obtaining an SSL certificate, you need to make sure that all your software is updated at all times, to ensure that you are free from any malicious attack that can cripple your e-commerce management system, or allow exploitation of your system’s security. You can easily keep your catalog up to date and secure from illicit purchases by fraudsters with the use of a Product Information Management (PIM) tool.

IP tracking

Some of your customers and clients might opt for the use of a secure VPN service to ensure their privacy and protect their data from being exploited. However, even though this is good for your customers, it might prevent you from being able to know the exact location from which a person is initiating a purchase. This is where using an IP address tracking tool comes in, with this you can track the address from which the purchase was made, and if it was made or trying to be made from a located that has been blacklisted for fraudulent activities, then you can block the transaction. Cyber scammers always take advantage of the buying frenzy during periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday to bypass the system, as most online stores usually relax their security measures a bit in favor of making more sales. You should ensure that you always perform an IP check for any purchase carried out on your platform.

Make use of CVV and AVS verifications

CVV stands for ‘card verification value’, and this is the 3 digit number written at the back of credit cards to ensure that even when the card number is stolen, the CVV can offer an extra layer of protection since you need to be physically holding the card to get this number. You can easily configure an app or a service to help you perform these kinds of checks on your E-commerce platform.

AVS stands for ‘address verification system’ this is usually installed like an extra layer of security to the CVV. AVS performs a check in the background while not asking for any further details from your client, it checks if billing address given on your platform matches the one registered for the credit card. This can help you fish out fraudsters easily when the billing address is in a different Country from the one registered on the credit card. Further verification can be requested if this is the case.

Back up your contents

Like I stated above, fraud could come in different forms, and one of them is the actual jacking of your website. In the event that your website is hacked and the existing content of the website is tampered with, and your business suffers a great loss as a result of this. It is necessary and business-saving to have all of your existing content backed up in real-time on a secure cloud platform. So that this way, you can easily close down the existing platform and launch a new one free of the hacker’s code.

Watch out for High-Risk regions

Regardless of the country, your e-commerce website is hosted in, the moment you launch it, you are opening it up to the global market on the internet. This means people from countries that have been flagged as high-risk regions due to the high level of fraudulent cyber activities that go on in that region will also want to shoot from your platform. As a form of precaution, you can prevent the purchase of any kind of goods and services on your platform from those regions, or you can require more verification options to enable a person from that region to buy from you. Some of those regions include Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Central America, and Western Europe. Yugoslavia has been flagged as the most high-risk country by most websites.

Conclusion:

One might not be able to totally prevent Frauds on an e-commerce website, but with the use of the options mentioned above, you can easily protect your E-commerce website from cyber scammers. One thing should be considered that every website should have SSL certificate on their website which you can get from SSL certificate provider to save customers from cyber intruders.