Re:Ask HN: dealing with credit card fraud while selling phys...
by jacquesm on Saturday September 25, 2010 @04:23AM
(#1726592)
> We're planning to use the shipping address returned from Paypal as-is (and not querying from our side), mostly for stripping the funnel to it's bare minimum -is that kosher?
Yes, it's kosher, but there are a number of checks you can't do like that (such as doing geo verification of the IP, email verification).
Those go a long way in screening out fraudulent charges.
Presumably paypal has already done a bunch of that, but if the shipping address paypal gives you does not match the geolocation of the IP and residential information of the account holder (not always the same as the shipping address!) within reason that would be a great reason not to ship.
> any particular countries which we should be careful about?
Yes, but that's going to make me a lot of enemies here ;)
Until you have the fraud angle worked out and have ways to monitor and predict risky transactions I would stick to the US initially, the roll out in Europe, one country at a time, after that Japan, and I'd leave it like that for a long time to come.
This is not because I do not like people from other countries (rather the opposite), but because combating fraud is a percentage game and one fraudulent transaction can eat up the profits of 10 or more good ones if you're in to physical goods (depending on your margin of course), as well as cause you to be banned, which is a risk not worth taking.
Yes, it's kosher, but there are a number of checks you can't do like that (such as doing geo verification of the IP, email verification).
Those go a long way in screening out fraudulent charges.
Presumably paypal has already done a bunch of that, but if the shipping address paypal gives you does not match the geolocation of the IP and residential information of the account holder (not always the same as the shipping address!) within reason that would be a great reason not to ship.
> any particular countries which we should be careful about?
Yes, but that's going to make me a lot of enemies here ;)
Until you have the fraud angle worked out and have ways to monitor and predict risky transactions I would stick to the US initially, the roll out in Europe, one country at a time, after that Japan, and I'd leave it like that for a long time to come.
This is not because I do not like people from other countries (rather the opposite), but because combating fraud is a percentage game and one fraudulent transaction can eat up the profits of 10 or more good ones if you're in to physical goods (depending on your margin of course), as well as cause you to be banned, which is a risk not worth taking.