How To Prevent Your 3rd Party Merchant Account From Suspension

What would you do if you were sent an email from your online credit card processor telling you that your account has been suspended or frozen? How are you going to pay the bills in the meantime? It is extremely important for you to familiarize yourself with the terms of your contract with your credit card processor. As long as you comply with their set regulation and guidelines to maintain your account in good standing you should have no problems.

However, if for some reason you were faced with your account being suspended you need to know:

  • what to do
  • when to do it
  • and what is the reason for your account being suspended in the first place

    Factors Leading To Account Suspension!

  • Persistent pattern of chargebacks.
  • Poor or inadequate response to customers and a history of unresolved complaints or refused refunds
  • Supplying faulty or inferior goods, not as described in your product description
  • Entering customer credit cards yourself which goes against your merchant agreement

    To protect yourself from unnecessary problems and disruption of your daily business you should use another third party credit card provider while you are making enquiries to restore your account. Make regular transfers of your earnings to your bank account and keep up to date records of all transactions.

    10 Point Checklist To Prevent Fraudulent Orders

    1. Do not use the same bank account to receive your earnings and for your daily essentials such as expenses, bills, shopping, etc. Use a separate bank account to deposit funds from sales and make regular transfers into a separate bank account.

    2. Provide full contact details so that customers can contact you direct. Also make sure you return their messages in good time to avoid unnecessary delays and aggravation.

    3. Make a clear statement in your terms and order page that customers should use their primary email address and not free email accounts. A high proportion of free throw away email accounts are regularly used to commit fraud.

    4. Only allow orders to be shipped to the same address as the billing address registered to the customers credit card. Many cases of fraud use alternative addresses to get hold of goods without the original credit card holders knowledge.

    5. Exclude delivery to known high risk countries. You can get this information from your credit card company. Use a pull down menu with a full list of countries eligible for delivery of your goods.

    6. Consider setting a minimum spend value to help discourage fraudulent attempts to place orders for small sums repeatedly in the hope of getting goods with stolen cards.

    7. Review orders manually to check if repeated orders have been made using the same credit card number.

    8. Don