How to protect your clients from fraud when selling online

Any business that sells services, digital products or physical products online needs to be aware of the dangers of fraud. There are a lot of scammers out there and they have a lot of tricks up their sleave they will use to get hold of your clients’ personal details.

Scammers might try to get hold of their account details so they can log in and then make purchases using somebody else’s credit card. They may also sell the credit card details so other scammers can steal the identity of your clients and make online purchases on other sites.

Don’t forget that you are at risk of fraud too and you may be taking payments from scammers without even realizing it. 

Whether you are running a full blown e-commerce business, selling your own digital products or services or you are just selling products through your blog, you have a responsibility to protect your clients from fraud.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done in a lot of cases because the scammers are always coming up with new techniques.

If you are worried about fraud, here are 3 ways to protect yourself:

Choose A Reliable Payment Gateway

In order to take online payments, you will need to use a payment gateway. The gateway is like the intermediary between you, the clients, and the banks that are involved in the transaction.

If you choose an intelligent payment gateway that uses the most up-to-date technology to protect all information at every stage of the transaction, you drastically reduce the risk of fraud.

But if you go with a basic payment gateway that doesn’t have very robust security features, it’s much easier for scammers to hack in and steal information, putting your clients at risk.

Remember, the cheapest option isn’t always the best because you get what you pay for and you can’t afford to cut corners here.

Some examples of payment gateways are Stripe, Paypal, WePay, Inovio or Authorize.net to name a few.

Educate Your Clients

Educating your clients is so important because scammers will often use phishing emails to get hold of their details. This is when they send an email that looks as if it has come from your business, asking for them to confirm their login details or click on a link etc.

Scammers are very good at making these emails look legitimate so a lot of people get caught out by them. You can prevent this if you warn your clients about what you’re going to ask them and what’s going to happen next when they create an account on your site, whether it’s your membership site, an e-commerce platform or a course platform hosted on your own website.

Tell them that you will never ask them to share their login details on an email or over the phone.

You can also give them a few pointers on how to spot phishing emails because even the most convincing ones have some small details that give them away as fakes.

Improve Your Own Site Security

If hackers are able to take over your site and clients keep logging into their accounts, they are just handing their details over and you’ll end up with a lot of people falling victim to fraud.

That’s why it’s so important that you take steps to improve your site security and keep security software updated at all times. If you let this slide, you put yourself and all of your clients at risk.

You can never completely eliminate the risk of fraud when selling service or digital products online, but if you take these steps, you can reduce it in a big way.