During covid we've seen an explosive growth B2B and B2C business. Organizations that may have done the bulk of their business face to face have been forced to move to the online channel to survive.
There is a learning curve for these new businesses as they shift their activities to the online channel. It's not just a matter of getting a web domain, creating a pretty interface, and waiting on the customers to come. Businesses are learning the hard way that you don't know, what you don't know.
I'm just going to talk briefly to two of these areas that you may not have been aware of if you are new to doing business online: Security and Transaction Management
Security
The bad guys love it when a new business enters the online space. They know that the business won't start out with a fully deployed fortress, and there are bad actors out there that make a living figuring out how to exploit new entrants to the marketplace.
You don't know how much money you can lose until it is gone. It is worth the extra time and money to put extra security protection in place, when you are launching a new business, to detect and block bad actors. Common places that bad actors will be exploiting you: New user sign up (identity theft, fake identities), log ins (account takeovers), payments (intercepting/redirecting payments, using stolen credit cards for purchases, etc), account management (hide fraudulent activity by updating contact details on legitimate customer accounts)
Some tools that you can put in place at the outset by working with a 3rd party provider (don't even try this on your own, it's way too complex and attack vectors change very quickly):
Digital identity assessment (does the user behind this device have a risky profile - "risky" can represent many things, and none of them good!)
Physical identity assessment (check the information that the user is providing you with, and validate that it is real, belongs to a single entity, and hasn't been compromised)
Transaction Management
One of the things you might not be thinking as a newer entrant to the digital space is about authorization rates. You might be thinking you just pick a payment provider, and you get what you get. But... if you are selling things on a global scale (and who isn't these days, the internet is open to everyone), then managing authorization rates is important to maximize your revenue.
Businesses can lose sales with if their authorization rates are low because you could be turning away legitimate business opportunities, and contrarywise, higher authorization rates will result in more revenue for you.
In general, you should expect to have about an 80-90% authorization rate - if you are seeing numbers lower than that, you probably have opportunities for improvement. Some of the things you want to explore (particularly for cross-border sales):
Use acquiring networks closer to the location of your customer (for example if you are in the US, but your customer is in Spain, a Spanish network may be more likely to approve your customer's transactions because they are more familiar with the risk landscape of the user and the location)
Transact in the local currency with local payment methods
Set up intelligent payment routing: Efficiently routing payment transactions (by country, currency, etc) can help with approval rates as payment service providers (PSPs) each have their own fraud scoring algorithms
Fraud & chargeback management: Tune your risk rules according to your organizations risk appetite. Don't set and forget, fraud vectors of attack change all the time and so you should be constantly assessing and tuning your fraud rules
Tax compliance & regulations: Be familiar with local requirements, and incorporate those insights when entering new markets
Unified reporting - track what you are spending and what your conversion and auth rates are by region, provider, etc
Depending on the volume you have, incremental changes to your authentication and authorization rates can have huge impact to your bottom line.
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