How to Use Digital Payments to Grow Your E-Commerce Business

A vast majority of e-commerce business retailers consider a smooth payment system to be of utmost importance to their overall growth strategy. The reason is simple. Smooth payment systems help to attract and retain customers. Retained customers are indispensable to sustained growth in e-commerce business. If you want to protect your customers, protect your business and grow it, here are tips on how to use digital payments to do so.
 
Encourage Local Payment Habits

Encouraging local payment habits helps e-commerce businesses to retain customers. In doing so, you can directly offer local payment methods and integrate payment platforms with other providers to offer a seamless customer experience. These platforms like PayPal for instance can allow you expand internationally for enhanced customer experience. This is because your customers can easily take advantage of advanced checkout processes that some integrated platforms offer to accept multiple payment options like debit and credit cards, digital wallets in addition to various local payment methods. This helps retailers to cater to consumers’ local payment needs and can be really great for customer experience.

Simplify Your Payment Processes to Retain Customers

Undoubtedly, e-commerce retail environment is rapidly changing. For this reason, digital payments have become an essential part of growth and operational efficiency in e-commerce landscape. Significantly, digital payments simplify things not only for the retailer, but also for the customer. Customers shopping experience can be greatly enhanced by smooth and efficient checkout processes. This is why most retailers always want to use their payment platforms to better understand customer preferences. These payment transactions offer particularly valuable data for this purpose and retailers can reliably depend on these data to expand and grow their businesses.

Align Your Payments Strategy and Business Goals

In today’s e-commerce business landscape, effective payment processing is becoming really crucial to successfully addressing the many challenges retailers face. These payment processes ensure operational stability by helping to drive sustainable growth in an increasingly digitalized marketplace. For instance, an end-to-end payment solution does much more than just let customers check out smoothly. It directly helps to enhance customer experience and business growth because an enhanced customer experience requires a strong back-end system that is tailored to the needs of the business. If your business is backed by a powerful back-end, it can easily streamline its operations and access all data insights in one place. That helps business growth and expansion.

Protect Your Business from Cyber-Criminals

As e-commerce business landscape deepens, so are its challenges particularly in terms of cyber-crimes. Even though digital payments offer many benefits, they also pose challenges. Many are quite vulnerable to cyber-crimes particularly fraud. These are real and potent threats to business growth. If you want to comprehensively address these threats, you must prioritize robust fraud and risk management strategies. Some key measures you can take include but not limited to advanced fraud protection techniques. You can also take deliberate steps to ensure your business complies fully with e-commerce business statutes and other regulations. Doing so will help you to reduce risk and prevent fraud. PayPal for instance can help provide customizable solutions for your business. These solutions use machine-learning, automated decision-making and data-driven insights to help businesses make decisions that enhance growth.

6 Common Types of E-Commerce Fraud Threatening Online Shopping

If you run an e-commerce store and you are desirous to stay ahead of inevitable online threats, protect your business revenues and preserve customer loyalty, it is in your best interest to embark on a comprehensive approach to tackling e-commerce fraud. This is because, as online shopping and e-commerce business continue to grow, e-commerce fraud grows in tandem. These days, online scammers/cybercriminals are in “business” 24/7 using all kinds of tricks to scam online shoppers. Technically, e-commerce fraud is a form of cybercrime that directly affects online consumer transactions. These crimes do not just have a negative impact on consumers; they create significant operational problems for e-commerce businesses too. Many e-commerce businesses lose good money on refunding transactions, dealing with fake chargebacks, and more. This is in addition to regulatory fines, loss of customer trust, and a decrease in long-term revenue, all negatively impacting the fortunes of the business.

Following are six of the commonest types of e-commerce fraud you must know about and be prepared to deal with to grow your e-commerce business.
 
1. Credit Card Fraud

Anytime cyber criminals are able to steal the identity of a customer, they can use the customer information for many different purposes mostly criminal. They can even obtain contact details to sell to third parties, steal passwords to access accounts, and much more. When these criminals embark on credit card fraud, their main focus is usually on accessing payment details. They use data breaches, phishing attacks, hacking strategies, and more to gain access to a customer's credit card details. Some of these criminals can even hack into e-commerce businesses’ databases to access huge volumes of credit card information at once. When this happens, these businesses risk serious damage to their reputation. What to do? Businesses can now deploy some smart payment solutions to checkmate cyber criminals. These payment processing solutions now come with built-in tools for automatically detecting and mitigating fraud. They can automatically monitor suspicious transactions, alert victims to threats, and even stop payments from going through if they suspect fraud. This way, customers can conveniently shop seamlessly with a bit more confidence.

2. Chargeback Fraud

Technically, chargeback fraud is one of the few types of e-commerce fraud that has a more significant impact on businesses than consumers. Chargeback is what happens when customers make a purchase, receive their product/service, and then dispute the charge with their credit card company to get a refund. Some customers can do it for legitimate business purposes and really not to steal money as criminals will do. This is why this form of fraud can at times be really difficult for businesses to address. Such businesses can turn to smart tools for help. These tools can help flag potentially suspicious orders based on filters, like order size, frequency, and shipping address. With these tools, businesses can accurately create blacklists of customers who are known for committing chargeback fraud to help mitigate the problem.

3. Refund Fraud

When criminals steal a customer’s identity, they can pose as the customer and request refunds for even legitimate transactions. In refund frauds, it's usually a criminal posing as a customer, who never actually purchased a product/service, who asks for their money back. Some criminals at times attempt to return stolen or counterfeit products to the business and request refund while others can also ask for refund claiming they never received the product they paid for. Some customers can even commit refund fraud themselves by way of "double dipping". Double dipping occurs when a customer requests a refund from both their product retailer and the credit card company to get double their money back. What to do? Businesses can limit refund fraud by way of extra caution. They can carefully validate a purchase with a customer by asking for pictures of the item, and double-checking to ensure that a refund is legitimate.

4. Brand Impersonation

Cyber criminals now use phishing attacks on e-commerce platforms to steal enough info to impersonate the business. They now pose a serious threat to e-commerce businesses and their customers. Criminals use phishing and social engineering tactics to leverage deceptive emails, messages, and websites to trick users into sharing sensitive information. They can even fake websites, pictures, products and other personal business information so well that that it takes the legitimate business quite some time to detect. Many businesses only find out about criminals "impersonating" their business from victim incident reports. By this time, at times a lot of damage has been done already. What to do? Businesses can mitigate brand impersonation by adopting an advanced approach to detecting instances of phishing, social engineering, and brand impersonation against their customers. AI-powered solutions can help businesses proactively detect, counter, and control fraud with exceptional efficiency.

5. Affiliate Fraud

Affiliate fraud happens only in e-commerce businesses that use affiliate marketing programs to sell their products. These businesses pay commissions to third parties or affiliates who help in generating sales. This is where criminals come in who want to earn commissions using underhanded tactics.  To commit affiliate fraud, criminals use tactics like bots, fake accounts, and click farms to generate artificial traffic, sales, and clicks designed to inflate their commission earnings. Some criminals use tactics like cookie stuffing to place cookies on a user's computer without their consent. This is designed to inflate the number of sales or clicks attributed to an account. While some others submit fake leads and customer information to e-commerce businesses to claim rewards they haven't earned. What to do? A very careful and diligent approach to affiliate marketing is advisable. It helps if businesses can carefully vet affiliates, partners, and influencers very well. This is with a view to carefully validating each purchase and using attribution tracking tools to ensure they're paying and distributing commissions correctly.

6. Identity Theft

Online, identity theft is one of the oldest forms of fraud in e-commerce business. It happens when a cyber-criminal uses someone else's personal information with intent to commit a crime. It involves such vital info as the person’s address, name, and credit card details which these criminals use to open accounts, make unauthorized purchases, or complete online actions. These criminals can acquire sensitive customer information in a range of ways, from leveraging data breaches to using phishing tactics. Armed with such vital and sensitive information, they can then criminally use the information to impersonate the victim. If they manage to gain access to steal employee information from e-commerce businesses, they can use the information to gain access to e-commerce platforms and back-end systems for criminal purposes. What to do? It is advisable for e-commerce businesses to invest in more advanced authentication methods. These are methods that require multi-factor authentication for all users of customer and employee accounts.

Final Thoughts

It is now well known that e-commerce fraud is on the increase just as e-commerce businesses are increasing online. As the threat to e-commerce landscape continues to evolve, the strategies used by e-commerce businesses to mitigate fraud must continue to evolve too. By staying aware of the latest threats and committing to a strategy of constant optimization and evolution, e-commerce businesses can stay secure over the long term.

To protect their revenue, customers, and brand reputation, e-commerce business owners must ensure they're using holistic methods to address fraud. What is needed is not just using secure payment gateways and implementing strong authentication methods. It also requires diligently monitoring transactions and user behavior, tracking fraudulent websites, and leveraging state-of-the-art tools to stay one step ahead of threats.