Top 8 Practical Ways to Prevent Ecommerce Fraud in 2022

The cost of eCommerce fraud across the globe is expected to reach $40.62 billion by 2027. As new and more innovative methods are being used to attack websites, retailers must constantly adapt to survive. So how well does your website fare?

If you think you may need to improve, we can help. Read on as we give 8 eCommerce fraud techniques to secure your site. 

1. Introduce Cybersecurity Policies

Ecommerce fraud prevention starts and ends with the people in your organization. If they are not trained or given guidance, then they have no way of knowing the expectations. It is up to you to build awareness and foster a culture of best practices with cybersecurity policies. 

Start by educating them on modern phishing tactics and the language of social engineering. Make sure you get an audit done by a professional security company. Ask for their guidance on how and what you should be teaching your staff. 

2. Add Website SSL Certification

If you don’t have SSL certification on your eCommerce sites, then you may be losing a lot of business. The extra protection they provide can flag your website as safe in browsers. It may cause people to leave if you don’t have it installed. 

SSL stands for secure socket layers and these certificates will encrypt data as it is in transit. It works by providing a secure key when two communication channels open online. For each new session, new encryption keys will be provided. 

By having them, the people on each end are verifying the other one is who they claim to be. This prevents data, like credit card information, from being intercepted by third parties. 

3. Enforcing Strong Passwords

As a customer, it can be frustrating to create an account password, only to find you need numbers, letters, upper and lowercase along with special characters. Yet it is worse to find out your account has been hacked. Using strong, robust passwords is still one of the most effective eCommerce fraud solutions.

The concept is simple. Hackers will use sophisticated programs and algorithms to work out the password string. When you use more characters and variables, it becomes harder to do. 

Make sure it is not only your customers who have to follow this practice. Your employees should also use this for their own accounts, both business and personal. 

4. Schedule Regular Security Audits

The ways hackers and criminals attack your website change daily. Even with the best fraud detection, you will need to keep up to date with trends and adapt to them.

A regular security audit will highlight flaws in the system and tell you how to rectify them. It will check over the following:

• Update shopping cart plugins
• Check the SSL certificate
• Check PCI compliance
• Back up the website
• Remove broken links and inactive plugins

Some of these will need conducting more regularly than others. Failing to change them can you leave your website vulnerable. 

5. Introduce Chargeback Prevention

A chargeback is a very specific form of fraud that is on the rise. It involves a fraudster purchasing items from a company online through a credit card. When they get the goods, they will claim they did not authorize the transaction. 

The credit card company then checks with the merchant to see if authorization for the purchase had occurred. If they do not have a chargeback solution in place that proves it was, the money gets refunded to the owner of the card. This places the goods in their hands with a refund, putting the cost on to the merchant. 

6. Get PCI Compliant

PCI stands for the payment card industry. They have their own security standards council, set up to prevent fraud. Most of the big credit card brands are members and they work together to eliminate payment scams. 

There is eCommerce fraud software available that will check your site to see if it complies with their guidelines. It is mainly related to the storing of information, processing it, and how it is transmitted. Checks should be done several times a year. 

7. Limit Customer Information

The days of hoarding customer information for marketing purposes are over. A drive towards privacy and security means this is no longer feasible. Even the big tech companies such as Google are moving towards models that favor privacy.

As a webmaster, you need to limit customer information to the essentials. Store as little personally identifiable information (PII) as possible. Any information you do store should be encrypted and have the highest levels of security.

When this information is leaked, you will suffer heavy fines and losses. The less you have, the less you have to lose and this will deter would-be attackers.

8. Understand Customer Behaviour

Knowing how your customers interact with your site can help flag unwanted behavior. Add systems such as breaks that can block credit cards used over a certain amount or preset. This helps limit damages if someone decides to use your site for unauthorized fraudulent purchases. 

Preventing eCommerce Fraud

Now you know these tips to prevent eCommerce fraud, start to implement them. Should you have an in-house tech team then speak with them to see which are already being done and what else can be incorporated. If you don’t, then consider outsourcing security to professionals. 

If you found this article informative, we have many more to assist. We understand that growing a business online is hard. From marketing to finance, we can guide you every step of the way.