Protect Your Customers In-Store and Online

When customers choose to spend money with your business, they do so with the trust that their private financial information will remain secure. Whether the majority of business is conducted in-store or online, there are industry best practices for both types of transactions. We’ll run through a few of the most important suggestions when it comes to protecting your customers’ financial information.

In-Store Shopping

For in-store shopping, you’ll want to take a look at the features of your current point-of-sale system. With the introduction of chip cards, it is wise for merchants to upgrade to a system that is EMV-enabled. EMV-enabled devices have the ability to read data stored on a chip within the card. During the transaction authorization process, strong cryptographic functions are used to validate the authenticity of the card and cardholder. By using chips as an active part of the payment transaction, EMV cards and devices help prevent credit card fraud from stolen account numbers and cloned payment cards.

Another consideration for is the free wi-fi network offered to shoppers. Cardfellow states that “Any customer using your store’s Wi-Fi can essentially exploit the entire network, accessing cloud-connected POS terminals, backend customer databases, and more.” and warns to closely monitor network traffic at all times, especially during holiday season.

Online Shopping

A service that we offer that helps prevent online fraud is through our Authorize.Net Payment Gateway — designed for small to medium-sized businesses. The complete list of features included with this gateway can be seen here, but we will focus on its ability to protect your customers from fraud:

  • Identify, manage and prevent suspicious and potentially costly fraudulent transactions with our exclusive customizable, rules-based Advanced Fraud Detection Suite (AFDS)
  • Address Verification Service (AVS)
  • Card Code Verification (CVV2)
  • Support for Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode

If you need assistance discerning what security measurements to implement in-store or online, give us a call! We’re happy to talk through the protocol you currently have in place and how it can be improved to protect your customers’ financial information.