The content this month on Building Keystones featured important information on top trends and challenges for ecommerce professionals, and insight into the structure and use of paid search advertising.
This month’s Ecommerce Digest will help you understand chargeback fraud, conversion rate optimization for B2B buyers, customer experience and the impact of U.S. sanctions against Russia on the payments industry.
Fraud, Chargebacks and Chargeback Fraud
Ecommerce Inequality Leading to Chargebacks and Friendly Fraud | Digital Journal
There’s fraud, then there are chargebacks and then there is chargeback fraud. Fraud is when someone uses a stolen credit card to order things online. A chargeback occurs when the victim of the stolen credit card disputes the fraudulent charge to their credit issuer. Chargeback fraud is when a customer legitimately places an online order with their own money and receives the product. Then, in order to receive something for nothing, the buyer issues a chargeback even though the transaction took place in good faith. This article, from the Canadian Internet news service Digital Journal, provides a good overview of the background and impact of chargebacks and chargeback fraud to online merchants.
Have you been challenged by chargeback fraud? Tell us how you combated it in the comment section below.
Conversion Rate Optimization for B2B Buyers
How to Use Data About B2B Buyer Behavior to Improve Conversions | FunnelEnvy
This post from FunnelEnvy emphasizes a really important point in ecommerce analytics: Most of the visitors to your site, or even shopping cart, will not end up buying something the first time they visit your site. In fact, according to a blog post by SeeWhy, 99 percent of first time visitors to ecommerce sites do not plan on buying anything. Of those, 75 percent bounce with the intent to return. This is especially important to understand with B2B buyers who are more relationship than transaction oriented.
Tell us your unique advice for maintaining B2B buyer relationships in the comment section.
Customer Experience
Brick-and-mortar retailers need to make customers feel they’re walking into a website | Quartz
While this article is really about what brick-and-mortar stores must do to capture today’s Internet obsessed retail market, it also hold the key to success for online merchants. The key is providing customers with consistent experiences across all digital and physical channels. Not only that, but it is also crucial to make the website experience as engaging as possible. But getting to that point is time consuming and requires a lot of creative and technical effort. The first step is to create a core brand story and identify the primary values your brand brings to your customers.
We want to know how you create a unified customer experience in a multichannel world.
New Russian Payment Card
Russia to Introduce National Payment Card | PaymentEye
As an ecommerce enthusiast, I subscribe to the PaymentEye emails. When I first read the title in this email, I thought that I would read about an exciting new payment method for Russian ecommerce. As I investigated this story more, I realized that this new payment card has broader implications.
For the past several months, due to U.S. sanctions, many Russian credit card holders have been unable to shop online with their Visa and MasterCards. Consequently, the Central Bank of Russia introduced a new Russian payment method as an alternative to Visa and MasterCard. Ostensibly, this was to provide Russian consumers with a new local payment option. However, as the article notes, this announcement is also a response to the sanctions. The upshot of this announcement is new regulations for foreign payment card providers operating in the Russian Federation. The new regulations require payment providers to make a large security deposit in Russian banks before they can process payments.
Will Russia continue to place hurdles in front of foreign payment services? And will this decision signify a growing trend in other important emerging markets? It is hard to predict the future from my armchair, but those with major shopping cart traffic from Russia should keep their eyes peeled for future disruptions.
How do you think the payment situation in Russia will turn out? Tell us your thoughts.
