ARCHIVES

6

Results: PayPal as a primary payment provider

February 18, 2008

It’s now been just over 6 months since I made PayPal the primary payment method on my ecommerce sites in an effort to reduce losses to fraud (see Will 53% of customers switch to PayPal and Betting on Igor). It takes a long time to see the effects of something like this, since chargebacks tend [...]

1

Ouch, credit card fraud bites hard as ever

October 10, 2007

$3,000 disappeared because I didn’t notice the pattern for 4 days. Some fraudster attempted to place orders using 69 different credit cards before I closed all the accounts and refunded all the charges. Looks like this person had a large list of credit cards about to expire he was running through, since a few couldn’t [...]

1

An update on fraud with PayPal

August 18, 2007

So far, so good. It will take at least 2-3 months to find out whether anything’s actually changed after switching to PayPal as the sole payment provider for new customers; stolen credit cards used without a PayPal account won’t show up on the rightful owner’s billing statement any faster. But I can say that the [...]

4

Betting on IGOR

August 15, 2007

This book was my best buy of the year so far. It packs tons and tons of experience into 400-some dense pages of interviews with the founders of 30 startups. I was particularly interested in the story of PayPal’s early days as recounted by cofounder Max Levchin, the guy that drove technology for the [...]

7

Will 53% of customers switch to PayPal?

August 12, 2007

It’s time to find out. I just rolled out the updated Visitor Boost and Targeted Visitors sites that send all new customers directly to PayPal for payment. This is the riskiest thing I’ve ever done with these sites, but I need to start taking some risks — I’ve got 10 months until I graduate college [...]

8

Missing Money and Solving Chargebacks

August 9, 2007

In the past few weeks, I’ve mentioned some “missing money” a few times – QuickBooks telling me I earned more this year than I could account for in my bank accounts. I think I finally found that today while going over things again and figuring out how July went (worse than May and June, better [...]

7

I need an accountant

June 28, 2007

I got some good news on my voice mail this morning – my tax audit is unofficially over. I haven’t mentioned it here before: The “Small Business Self Employed” division of the IRS audited the Schedule C of my 2005 tax return. It took about 2 months of mailing binders of documents back and forth [...]

8

MaxMind minFraud detects fraud more reliably

June 25, 2007

A few months of testing and the verdict is in: MaxMind minFraud flags more transactions made with stolen credit cards as high risk than my own fraud scoring code. minFraud does a lot I can’t: Checking the bank BIN location against the billing address, the location of the customer’s phone number against the billing address [...]