CyberSource

For many, South Florida, particularly Miami, evokes pleasing thoughts of palm trees, cold drinks and fun in the sun. But for multichannel marketers, the city raises a red flag. According to a survey of 318 online merchants by CyberSource, a provider of electronic payment, risk and security management solutions, Miami is the highest-risk area for online fraud in the U.S. Orders from this city have the highest probability of being fraudulent. With 10 percent of the vote, Miami edged New York (8 percent), which held the top spot the previous two years. Here are some other noteworthy findings of the survey: * Other

Turbocharge your cart with ‘payments.” In e-commerce, add a fifth “P” to the traditional four Ps of marketing — product, pricing, promotion and placement: payments. Catalogers can see real incremental sales improvement by offering customers and prospects additional ways to pay. I’ve devoted this article to review PayPal, Bill Me Later and Google Checkout. Adding some or all of these payment methods to your site can significantly lift Web sales. A 2004 CyberSource study shows that merchants offering four payment options, such as credit cards, gift certificates, e-checks and PayPal, get 20 percent higher conversion than those offering just credit cards.

The average percentage of online revenue lost to payment fraud has decreased slightly for smaller-sized merchants, but increased for merchants with annual online revenue of $5 million or more, according to a new study from CyberSource, a provider of e-payment and risk management solutions. ¥ 1.6 percent: average percentage of online revenue lost in 2005 to payment fraud for merchants with $500,000 or less in annual online revenue, down from 1.8 percent in 2004 and 2 percent in 2003. ¥ 1.6 percent in 2005 for merchants with $500,000 to $5 million in online revenue, down from 2.5 percent in 2004 and 1.9 percent in

For catalogers, payment fraud accounts for a high cost of doing business. On the Internet alone, estimates are that losses from payment fraud exceeded $1.6 billion in 2003. For direct-response merchants, credit card fraud losses averaged 1 percent of orders in 2003, which may not sound exorbitant, but in terms of total sales, the costs are huge. The good news is that online fraud losses declined from 2.9 percent of total online revenues in 2002 to 1.7 percent in 2003, according to Cybersource Corp./Mindwave Research. The cost to your customers also is high, because for every fraudulent order, merchants reject another three or