Top 10 Essential Fraud Prevention Strategies for E-commerce Businesses

Retailers are not new to the experience of theft. Historically, it was shoplifting, and today it’s online fraud.

Did you know that e-commerce businesses handle 206,000 cyber attacks per month globally?

Shocking right?

Hackers today use sophisticated techniques like clickjacking, click fraud, and click spamming to attack your systems.

A fraudulent transaction in any form negatively impacts your company’s reputation. Thankfully, various fraud prevention strategies reduce these risks and protect your e-commerce business from potential digital attacks.

Below are some strategies that are useful when creating a plan for keeping your e-commerce store secure.

1. Use Google Consent Management Platform (CMP)

Google CMP is a tool that manages users' consent for online advertising and data collection. From January 2024, companies using Google AdSense, AdMob, and AdManager require a certified CMP to continue serving ads to users in the UK, EEA, and EU.

The CMP allows Google’s measurement system to track the user’s consent. Google and third-party tags adjust their behavior based on the user’s consent. For instance, when a user denies location tracking, tags that record the geographical position function without the location data.

As you can adjust the online behavior based on the user’s consent, adhering to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law becomes easier.

Also, as Google CMP integrates with Google AdManager and AdSense, it provides potential defense against fraudulent online activities. The CMP helps you identify invalid traffic and prevent potential click frauds.

Moreover, the CMP integrates with tools like Google’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention to increase security. This tool stops payment transaction fraud by identifying targeted manual attacks and large-scale fraud attempts.

Google CMP can be a great tool for increasing the security of your e-commerce business.

2. Use ITIL for enhanced security

IT infrastructure library (ITIL) is a framework offering best practices for IT service management (ITSM). ITIL contributes to security management in the following ways:

• Incident Management: ITIL helps you identify and respond to security incidents. By using set procedures, you quickly detect, analyze, and address potential security incidents or breaches.
• Configuration management: ITIL properly documents and maintains an up-to-date record of all IT assets and configurations. As a result, you’re in a better position to control and protect your e-commerce store.
• Problem management: ITIL identifies the root cause of continuously recurring incidents or security issues. Through investigation of security incidents and identifying underlying vulnerabilities or weaknesses, ITIL helps you take action on the root causes and implement corrective measures. This approach avoids future security incidents and enhances overall information security.

3. Focus on SSL certificates and encryption

A Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates the identity of any website and the information it sends to the server. An SSL keeps your information safe and protected from hackers.

Having a website without an SSL certificate is suicidal for your e-commerce business. This certificate authenticates your website identity and establishes a strongly encrypted connection between the user’s browsers and the website’s server.

As a result, user information such as login credentials, credit card numbers, and personal data remains confidential, and third parties cannot read this information. This prevents hackers from accessing your customer’s information.

Additionally, websites with an SSL certificate create trust among users because it indicates that the connection is completely secure. When users know you’re committed to protecting their data and privacy, it increases user confidence, customer loyalty, and, ultimately, conversion rates.

4. Comply with PCI DSS regulations

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) regulation makes it essential for e-commerce stores to process credit card and cardholder information to maintain a completely secure environment.

The PCI DSS is essential for e-commerce platforms to process credit card and cardholder data in a completely secure environment.

When an e-commerce business fails to handle credit card information as per PCI standards, the card information can be hacked.

Sensitive information about the cardholder can also be used in identity fraud.

With businesses implementing PCI compliance witnessing a 50% reduction in cyberattacks, staying compliant with PCI DSS regulations ensures much more security and data protection.

You must evaluate and update your security protocols to meet potential industry regulations to stay compliant. Here are some other benefits of becoming PCI DSS-compliant:

• Enhances customer confidence
• Increases business growth
• Prevents potential data breaches
• Ensures compliance with other finance and banking-related standards
• Provides you with peace of mind

The price for compliance with PCI is far lower than the price you could pay for a potential data breach.

5. Use the address verification system

Another tool to add to your e-commerce tech stack is the address verification system or AVS. Using this tool, you verify the accuracy and validity of customer addresses during every online transaction. It’s an additional layer of security for your e-commerce store.

AVS determines whether the transaction address given by the user matches the address the bank has on its file for the credit card. A discrepancy indicates potential fraudulent activity.

As this occurs in real-time, you easily prevent suspicious activities at checkout, helping you reduce online fraud.

An address verification system offers the following benefits:

• Improves accuracy in e-commerce operations
• Identifies fraudulent transactions
• Avoids card-not-present frauds
• Ensures compliance with different legal regulations
• Helps you detect changes in the address

6. Encourage the use of strong passwords

Often, hackers gain entry into your e-commerce store or access a user’s private information because of weak passwords. While remembering complex passwords is challenging, it’s equally challenging for hackers to crack.

Hackers use various sophisticated tools to decode passwords. They use various permutations and combinations of passwords to gain unsolicited access.

So, encourage your users to use at least eight-character and alpha-numeric passwords requiring at least one capitalization, special character, and number. You may use our online strong password generator to generate a strong password.

Your users might grumble, but a strong password is a must to secure them from financial fraud.

Tell them why keeping a complex password is essential. This ensures your customers don’t fret over long passwords, and you gain some loyalty points. Keeping your customers informed builds customer lifetime value.

Also, to make the user experience seamless, display a password strength value bar for users to know whether their password is poor, fair, good, or excellent. This helps your users comply with strong password rules.

7. Conduct security audits

Regular security audits identify potential vulnerabilities before hackers do and help you address upcoming and emerging threats. Regular security audits are necessary as they maintain a strong security posture.

When conducting a security audit, ask yourself:

• Is your store’s software and plug-ins up-to-date?
• Is your SSL certificate active?
• Are you complying with the data privacy rules like GDPR?
• Are your users and employees using strong passwords?
• How much customer data do you need, and how much are you collecting?
• Are you using a CDN?
• How often do you run a security scan on your website?
• Is your IT infrastructure strong enough to prevent hackers from accessing critical information?

8. Stay alert during peak shopping season

Take extra precautions during peak season sales like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. Your customers are busy shopping and are more likely to overlook safety measures.

During such peak seasons, even you’ll also be extra busy fulfilling customer orders and ensuring a seamless customer experience. Many hackers wait for such a sales period because they know you are preoccupied with other important things. The chances of detecting potential fraud are reduced.

So, increase your investment in security best practices, especially when you anticipate high traffic volume to your store.

You can use additional security software or team members who manually review potentially fraudulent orders.

This reduces financial fraud and builds customer trust during the holiday or peak season.

9. Create a blacklist

During security audits and regular checks, you may notice that certain users test different credit cards on your eCommerce platform to verify whether you’re using fraud detection software.

After you identify them, it’s best to add them to a blacklist, as they cause data breaches in the future. When you put a user on a blacklist, you prevent them from making a purchase. Blacklisting isn’t a sure-shot way to reduce crime because hackers can maliciously change their identity to buy from your website again.

However, blacklisting helps you flag potentially fraudulent transactions before they occur.

10. Keep your HTTPS always enabled

While this might sound like a rookie strategy, it’s important because it helps you build a secure connection between your online store and a web browser.

Having an HTTPS ensures data is encrypted to protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers, customer names, and addresses to show up. Using HTTPs prevents cybercriminals and hackers from viewing the online transactions of your e-commerce store.

But to get HTTPs, you need an active SSL certificate.