Fraud is a very real threat to eCommerce stores and can be extremely costly to store owners. A single fraudulent transaction could easily cost you $150 or more. If you aren’t already proactively working against it, you should be.
Along with being costly to deal with, fraud can also be detrimental to store operations as merchant processors will often disable payment accounts if the fraud rate is too high. This can happen without warning and cause severe complications. Actively protecting against fraudulent transactions on your eCommerce site is one of the most important things you as a store owner can do.
Fraud Monitor is an extension that adds robust monitoring to your Easy Digital Downloads store and works for you to automatically detect possibly fraudulent purchases, allowing you to rest easy and focus on growing your business instead of fighting fraud.
Each time a purchase is made, Fraud Monitor runs the information through a series of checks and will automatically flag the purchase as needing further review if it detects anything suspicious.
When a purchase is flagged as possibly fraudulent, an email can be delivered automatically to the site admin and/or to the customer in order to request additional information necessary for verifying the purchase. Once the purchase is reviewed by a site manager, the receipt and download links can be released to the customer. If the purchase is confirmed to be fraudulent, Fraud Monitor allows you to easily reverse the payment, preventing costly chargebacks or fraud penalties in the future.
Fraud Monitor includes the ability to moderate payments when:
- An email addresses matches common fraud patterns.
- An IP address has already been flagged as possible fraud.
- A purchase comes from a country store owners identify as having high fraud rates.
- A purchase pattern contains product combinations that a typical customer wouldn’t purchase.
- A purchase has an unusually high total.
- A purchase has an unusually high number of items.
- A purchase is made from outside a certain radius in relation to the billing address.
- A store owner manually flags a payment to be reviewed or as fraudulent.
In addition to all those, Fraud Monitor can also flag a payment for review during the file download process when:
- The download request is originating from a country the store owner has identified as having high fraud rates.
- A download request is made within 24 hours of the initial purchase, and is from a different country than the purchase was made.