Adaptive Marketing Merchant Gateway

Adaptive Marketing LLC is a leading provider of membership discount programs. Through this blog we aim to share some of what we've learned about issues impacting online merchants. We want to support not just our own partners and affiliates but also all reputable online merchants: it's up to all of us who believe in Internet commerce (and you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't) to help make the online buying experience as secure as possible for consumers.

In fact, both merchants and consumers rank security as their primary concern about online business. (In a recent survey by Frederick Schneiders Research, 85% of users said that security concerns were the main deterrent to conducting e-commerce). At the top of the list of consumer concerns are phishing (spoofing people into revealing personal information), identity theft and computer security, and there are many sources of advice available to consumers -- consumer associations, business bureaus -- on how to prevent or get help on these problems. However, for merchants, the sources of advice are not quite so plentiful.

With the exception of solution vendors, few online resources offer information dedicated to a merchant's information needs on online security issues, fraudulent chargebacks, and protection of their own and their customers' data. The nature of CNP (Cardholder Not Present) transactions can carry risks for both a merchant and a consumer -- and preventing fraud is much less expensive and traumatic than having to clean up afterwards. Read Kevin Mitnick's "The Art of Intrusion", published by Wiley, and you'll see why. There are two areas where the bulk of fraudulent activity occurs.

The first area open to fraud (and worse) is, of course, hacking into company systems. We've all heard the stories about some very big companies whose systems and databases were hacked and customer data stolen. But in the overwhelming number of cases, there has been a stunning failure in the company's own systems that allowed the intrusion in the first place.

The second area is deception, of which the most problematic for online merchants is phishing. It happens when someone steals credit cards details or entire identities by spoofing people into revealing personal information and uses that information to make fraudulent purchases.

We've devoted a separate section of the blog to each of the above two topics.

While helping to close the information gap for online merchants, we also want to take the opportunity to bring to merchants' attention our own membership and loyalty programs. We bring a lot of value directly to consumers through an array of benefits in healthcare, discounts, security, personal property and more, and we want to provide some insights into legitimate online marketing techniques that we hope will be helpful.

We invite you to join our ongoing discussion of the latest developments.