In today’s world of credit card fraud and data breaches, a merchant who has an Ecommerce site has to be doubly careful.
More credit card refunds and fraud take place from Ecommerce transactions on websites than on card-present transactions inside a brick and mortar location. That is why the processing rate is higher for Ecommerce transactions than swiped transactions, because the risk of fraud and chargebacks is higher. Customer chargebacks cost the merchant money and loss of product — a double whammy!
Not only does an Ecommerce merchant have to put more practices in place to prevent fraud, but also to prevent a data breach. Ecommerce payment processing can provide a treasure chest of data for hackers who not only steel merchandise with a stolen credit card number, but also test stolen credit cards so they can sell them to others to steel merchandise.
Encryption and tokenization are tools to prevent hackers from stealing credit card information from an Ecommerce shopping site. Encryption jumbles the cardholder’s account number according to an algorithm with an encryption key attached. However, some hackers have been successful in creating tools to crack the encryption key and algorithm.
Tokenization goes a step further by replacing the cardholder data with an irreversible replacement token of meaningless characters that is then stored outside of the environment of the transaction taking place, called a token vault. These tokens are thus rendered useless to a hacker. The token is exchanged with the original cardholder data when it is sent from the token vault to the processor to complete the payment transaction.
An important question to ask your processor before you sign up for their Ecommerce or mobile gateway, is whether they have tokenization. Wawa Gas and Convenience Stores recently had a huge breach. This could not have happened with Electronic Money Company’s tokenized Ecommerce and mobile gateway.
In addition to tokenization, our gateway is also FREE. There are no extra monthly or transaction fees for our service. We simply specialize in advanced technology for our merchant services.
Contact us to set up your Ecommerce or Mobile merchant account. Protect your business and your customers’ cardholder information today!