E-commerce is an increasingly essential part of any art business. Read below for some tips to help you protect your business when taking payments online through your Artlogic website.
Stripe and Artlogic
Artlogic e-commerce is powered by Stripe, an industry-leading payment processing service for online businesses. In order to set up an online store with us you will also need to set up a Stripe account. While we hope our clients will never have to deal with any online fraud, there is always some risk when selling online and this article will aim to provide some further resources to help our clients learn more about protecting themselves when selling online.
As first port of call, we recommend referring directly to Stripe's website. As the payment processor, Stripe is responsible for handling any issues related to fraud and your online sales. Stripe invests a great deal of time in effort in creating resources concerning fraud and you can read more about this, along with their disputes procedure, by clicking here.
Some useful resources
We are also happy to point our clients to particular mechanisms Stripe provides that could be useful safeguards.
3D Secure
3D secure introduces an extra verification step with the card issuer when payment is taken. When this is used, it has the added benefit of triggering a liability shift to the bank/card issuer for any transaction disputed as ‘fraudulent’ by the cardholder. The features needed to make this work are built into our Stripe integration - however Stripe do not force this for all transactions as it is determined by the bank based on their own risk assessment.
To achieve the benefits of 3D secure and liability shift for all website payments - you can use the settings in the 'Online Sales Setup' screen within your CMS, allowing you to force this to be enabled either for all payments or payments over a specified threshold.
While this is largely beneficial there are a few considerations here:
- Card issuers may still initiate a retrieval request, so it could be possible to lose money in some cases.
- Some cardholders who have not activated 3D security on their account will be required to sign up, which would effectively block the sale until that has happened. This could lead to a lower conversion rate, if the user does not want to sign up, perhaps because it is a lower value sale. 3D secure transactions will be increasingly ubiquitous, as it improves protection for cardholder and merchant alike.
To strike a good balance we would suggest setting mandatory 3D secure verification after a certain threshold, in order to ensure high value transactions are always covered (for example, you could force this to be enabled for all transactions over GBP 2,000). If you wish to put this in place please contact us and we'd be happy to help.
Please note that 3D secure does not apply to payments made by Apple Pay if enabled.
Stripe Radar Protection
Stripe offers this service which uses algorithms and machine learning to automatically detect and block fraud. It has options to allow users to set ‘rules’ for which types of payments to block. For example, you could block based on 'risk level' or ensure the 'zip code' always matches the card, rules for when 3D Secure should be enforced. This option charges a small fee per transaction.
Apple Pay
Payments made by Apple Pay do not fall under the same rules as ordinary payments even though they are still processed through Stripe, so it is important to understand the rules before enabling this feature. For example, Apple Pay does not support 3D secure as it would for a normal card transaction, this means the benefits of liability shift do not apply.