Whether you’re accepting payments with PayPal or another merchant account provider, you’re going to want to make sure you follow some standard procedures to help prevent losing products, time, and money from fraudulent transactions.
When such events happen it’s never fun, and it’s easy to blame others. However, if you follow these basic steps when selling products online you will save yourself lots of headaches.
NOTE: These steps assume you’re using PayPal, but would be very similar no matter who your merchant account provider is.
- Configure your PayPal Fraud Filters.
Using fraud filters allows you to configure rules to block unwanted payments in the first place. Or, you can set a flag so that you still accept the payment, but you receive a warning that a filter was triggered and you may want to research the order prior to fulfilling it. - Only ship to a Confirmed address.
A confirmed address simply means the address matches what is on file with the credit card company for the buyer. This is the same as a full match with address verification (AVS) on credit card sales.The odds of a fraudster not only obtaining stolen credit card info, but also obtaining merchandise delivered to the actual card owners address are very slim.
- Ship with signature required.
PayPal’s Seller Protection policy will only cover transactions valued at $250 or higher if the package was shipped with signature required. This is something many sellers are not aware of until it’s too late.