Living in a digital world has brought about new changes to our collective society both in availability and accessibility. One major shift in global culture has been the shift to online purchases and merchants. In an unprecedented era, buyers in any part of the world with internet access (desktop or mobile) can browse, purchase and receive goods and services from merchants on a global scale (possibly the greatest gateway to global trade since the Silk Road–the real Silk Road).
In fact, an average of $1.2 million in global e-commerce sales are generated every 30 seconds, with over $250,000 of those sales made through mobile devices. Again, that means over $1 million in online purchases were made in the time it took to read this paragraph.
One of the concepts that has made this process possible is the credit card. Without it, every seller and merchant would still be forced to pay with and accept paper currency–largely limiting the amount of global trading and purchasing possible. In fact, as recent as 2013 there were a reported 278 million Visa cards in the U.S. (almost one credit card per resident–and that’s just one company). And they sure did use them–over 50% of the $8.6 trillion spent in the U.S. during the same year were spent using credit/debit cards. These purchases are made in full faith because of trust and consistency: over 60% of those all Millennials polled said that they expect their experiences with a brand to be the same across all mediums–in-store or online. This is where chargeback protection for eCommerce comes in.
All of these purchases are done using a convenient system which accommodates the lack of human interaction: the card not present transaction. These are necessary for online and mobile purchases to remain possible and convenient, but they also lead to a large amount of credit card fraud in the process. One of the biggest issues in this fraud is faulty chargeback protection for eCommerce sales (as this writer was recently hit with $1,400 in fraud charges, consider this a painful paragraph to write). In 2014, losses from credit card fraud reach over $16 billion, a whopping 19 percent higher than the losses from credit card fraud the year before; unfortunately, this was also the fourth consecutive year in which credit card fraud was higher than the increase in total card volume globally. And this surge in fraud has not gone unnoticed, with 6 out of 10 buyers concerned about card not present fraud when online shopping.
Don’t close your shopping tabs too soon, however, as certain companies have been working on improving and revolutionizing payment processing services to create more secure payment options for buyers around the world. And with online shopping sales expected to rise to $370 billion by 2017–a huge increase from the $231 billion spent in 2012–the 1.2 billion people expected to purchase goods and services online should be able to rest a little easier knowing that companies are working diligently to make chargeback protection for eCommerce more efficient in the near future.