How To Protect Your 3rd Party Merchant Account From Suspension by Nancy P Redford

1. Do not use the same bank account to receive your earnings
and for your daily essentials such as expenses, bills,
shopping, etc. Use a separate bank account to deposit funds
from sales and make regular transfers into a separate bank
account.

2. Provide full contact details so that customers can contact
you direct. Also make sure you return their messages in
good time to avoid unnecessary delays and aggravation.

3. Make a clear statement in your terms and order page that
customers should use their primary email address and not
free email accounts. A high proportion of free throw away
email accounts are regularly used to commit fraud.

4. Only allow orders to be shipped to the same address as the
billing address registered to the customers credit card.
Many cases of fraud use alternative addresses to get hold
of goods without the original credit card holders knowledge.

5. Exclude delivery to known high risk countries. You can get
this information from your credit card company. Use a pull
down menu with a full list of countries eligible for
delivery of your goods.

6. Consider setting a minimum spend value to help discourage
fraudulent attempts to place orders for small sums repeatedly
in the hope of getting goods with stolen cards.

7. Review orders manually to check if repeated orders have
been made using the same credit card number.

8. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket!

Use a minimum of two or more 3rd party companies for orders
so that you will always have at least one ongoing payment
system to continue to receive and process orders.

9. Refuse shipments to P.O. Boxes. Request the full mailing
address before shipping any order.

10. Put a hold on unusually high orders until further
verification can be made such as a phone call to the
customer.

Other areas to consider are to prevent the incidences of chargebacks.

What Are Chargebacks?

A chargeback is what is when a customer contacts their credit
card issuing company directly for a refund of a payment. The
credit card issuing company will claim back the full payment
on the customer’s behalf. For which a fee is charged to your
credit card processing company. This cost will also be charged
to you and you maybe subject to additional fees according to
your provider.

This process can become a very costly affair if you as a merchant
are subject to excessively high incidences of chargebacks. In
severe circumstances too many chargebacks can cost you your
merchant account.

In this case your account will be frozen and inactive pending
further investigation into all billing disputes.

In the case of fraud where a customers details were compromised
you cannot be 100% sure of when or how this may happen until
some time after the transaction. By that time you would have
already shipped the product to the customer. In these cases
you could stand to loose on the initial processing fees as
well as the time and cost to ship the goods.

Top Tips

Conduct regular checks on your list of orders at regular
intervals and mange your bank account and customer enquiries
to the best of your abilities as a reputable merchant. Your
continuing good standing as a reputable and trustworthy
merchant will help your business as long as you maintain
your daily business tasks to the highest standards and
afford your customers the highest levels of customer
support.

Maintain good bookkeeping of all orders so that you can
track orders to verify the dates when an order was placed
and any email contacts made to a customer for any disputes
received.

This could help in cases where a customer has forgotten
placing an order, or does not recognize the billing company
name on their statements. You should also make it very
clear on your order page and confirmation page as to the
billing name that will appear on customer statements to
prevent any confusion.

Nancy P Redford shows you how to Take Online Payments
for any web site without a costly merchant account.
Stay safe on the Internet by getting wise to Online Scams
and Shams. Plus get some of the best business tools and
resources for your home-based business here at:
http://www.miriadz.com

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