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Hack 67 Protect Yourself While Accepting Payments
Reduce your odds of getting burned by setting
firm policies about the types of payments you accept.
Just as bidders must be cautious
when sending money, as described in [Hack #29], sellers must be careful about the
payments they receive. A little common sense is all
that's required to avoid fraudulent payments,
payments that can be reversed, and payments that require excessive
fees to process.
Fortunately, it's the seller who sets the rules, at
least when it comes to payment terms. Before you start selling, and
especially before you send payment instructions to your customers,
you'll need to develop a strict policy regarding the
types of payments you'll accept.
PayPal. PayPal goes further than just about any other payment service to
protect its sellers from fraudulent payments (such as those made with
a stolen credit card). But in order to qualify for
PayPal's Seller
Protection Policy, you'll need to do each and every
one of the following:
Have a Premier or Business account, not a Personal account, as
described in [Hack #29].
Verify your account, which involves nothing more than linking an
ordinary bank account with your PayPal account and
"confirming" it by having PayPal
make two small deposits into it (which you get to keep).
Ship only to a customer's
confirmed street address, as described in Shipping to Confirmed Addresses. You can see
whether or not a buyer used a confirmed address in the transaction
details, found at www.
and in the payment notification email.
Shipping to Confirmed Addresses
Probably the stickiest of
all the requirements of PayPal's Seller Protection
Policy involves confirmed addresses. The problem is one of diplomacy
more than anything else.
Many PayPal members don't have confirmed addresses,
don't know how to confirm their addresses, and
don't know why they need to. What makes it worse is
that PayPal doesn't do an adequate job of explaining
confirmed addresses to their members, so it's often
left to sellers to educate their customers.
First, make sure to note in your auction description and your
payment-instructions email that you accept PayPal payments only with
confirmed addresses (if that's indeed what you
decide to do). If you then encounter a buyer who is confused about
confirmed addresses, you can explain the procedure (below) or simply
instruct him to go to address."
There are two ways to confirm one's street address
at PayPal:
Add a credit card to the PayPal account. The credit card billing
address is then added as a confirmed address. This takes about a
minute.
or:
If the buyer can't (or won't) link
a credit card to his PayPal account, he can still use
PayPal's Alternative Address Confirmation as long as
he has a "verified" PayPal account,
has been a PayPal member for more than 90 days, and has a
"Buyer Reputation Number" of more
than 10. The buyer then sends a fax to PayPal, at which point PayPal
sends a confirmation code to the street address the member is trying
to confirm. This process takes about a week.
Probably the biggest hurdle is that only PayPal members in the United
States can confirm their addresses, which means that you
aren't protected by PayPal's Seller
Protection Policy if you ship to a PayPal member in any other
country. See [Hack #69] for details.
You can configure PayPal to automatically block all incoming payments
that don't have confirmed addresses by going to My
Account
Profile Payment Receiving Preferences.Although this seems like a drastic step, it will eliminate the need
to repeatedly refund payments from bidders who can't
follow directions.
Always ship with a tracking number, as described in [Hack #68], and do so promptly. Make sure to
keep records of all tracking numbers for a minimum of six months.
Assuming you're diligent about these rules and you
respond quickly if one of your charges is disputed,
you'll never be held responsible for buyer fraud. If
a specific transaction doesn't qualify for
PayPal's Seller Protection Policy, PayPal will pull
the money out of your checking account or freeze your PayPal account
until the matter is resolved.
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Personal
and business checks. If you're smart, you'll never
accept a check as payment for an auction. Checks can bounce, buyers
can stop payment, and most sellers have no way of determining if a
check is even valid. If you must accept checks, ship only after the
check has cleared (which usually takes about two weeks). If you want
to accept payments only via postal mail, you're
better off restricting such payments to money orders and
cashier's checks.
Money orders, cashier's
checks, and BidPay. Money orders and cashier's checks
aren't like personal checks; they
don't bounce and they can't be as
easily stopped, so in that regard they're more like
cash. There's still the possibility of fraud,
however, so if you want to be on the safe side, always have a bank
teller inspect the money order or cashier's check.
BidPay is an exception to this, since sellers can check the validity
of payments they receive by going to www.bidpay.com.
Credit cards. If you accept credit cards directly through a merchant account, as
described in [Hack #75], you will
always run the risk of chargebacks. Most credit card companies regard
this as the cost of doing business, and will gladly pass that cost on
to you.
If someone pays you with a stolen credit card, or if the customer
simply forgets that they've bought something from
you, the charge can be disputed through the
cardholder's credit card company, as described in
[Hack #32]. The company that issues
your merchant account will then notify you of the chargeback, and
will assess a nonrefundable chargeback fee to your account in
addition to the amount of the original charge.
You can reduce the likelihood of chargebacks by setting the following
policies:
Ship only to the cardholder's billing address. When
processing the charge, verify that the address the bidder provided
matches the one on file with his or her credit card company.
Always ship with a tracking number, as described in [Hack #68], and ship promptly. Keep records
of all tracking numbers for a minimum of six months.
Require that your customers provide the CVV code, the three-digit
number (four digits for American Express) that appears after the card
number, typically on the back of the card. This extra bit of
information will help insure that the customer actually has the card
in his or her possession, especially in the event of a chargeback.
Be extremely careful when accepting payments from buyers in other
countries. Not only is the risk of fraud increased, but your ability
to defend yourself against chargebacks will be compromised.
Consider accepting credit card payments only from bidders with a
certain minimum feedback rating, say 20 or 50. Make that requirement
higher for international credit card payments.
International payments. See [Hack #69] for ways to protect
yourself when receiving payments from other countries.
