Retailer’s, especially online retailers always face the risk of making a sale, taking the money, shipping the goods and then being contacted by the card issuer informing them that the transaction was not authorised or fraudulent.

The most important thing that you can do to prevent this type of thing from happening is to ship to the cardholders address. But how do you always know that the cardholders address is actually the person you are shipping to. Merchant accounts don't always fail a transaction for the wrong address, therefore if a transaction goes through you cannot always be sure that this is a vindication that the address you're shipping to is the customers address.

ValidID validates if a person actually lives at the shipping/delivery address.

No one wants to refund money back to a card, especially when they have already shipped the goods and have little prospect of getting them back and in some cases goods can be valued in the hundreds or even thousands of pounds.

Owing to these issues, we have been increasingly asked by retailers, is there anything we can do to reduce the risk of sending goods to addresses where the cardholder does not reside and thus exposing ourselves to large chargebacks and losses?

ValidID is a tool that can do just that. ValidID verifies that people live where they say they live by connecting to the voters roll, which is the register of electors, along with customers specific credit file.

Let’s say for example you are sending goods to an address for a Mr Joseph Bloggs, you would log into our system key in his details and the delivery address, we would then tell you if he in fact resided at that address. If this check failed you would then know that sending the goods to that address would represent a risk of a chargeback on the card that you were taking payment on, at which point you could ask the customer for alternative payment that prevented you from picking up any losses associated with this type of transaction.

Nothing is going to ever prevent the risk of fraud but using a system such as this will always reduce your exposure to that real risk and for a few pounds it is worth saving hundreds and in some cases thousands.

Wholesalers

If you are a wholesaler who drop ships on behalf of retailers, you can validate the end customer to reduce your own exposure, or you are thinking of taking on new customers/retailers then our system can help you also.

SanctionsSearch.com our sister site which also incorporates ValidID has enhanced tools such as CompanyLookup. This tool allows firms to get credit information on companies allowing them to make informed decisions as to whether or not to deal with the client.

All these tools are designed to reduce your risk and exposure to losses throughout the business process from dealing with your own clients, through to dealing with your clients customers.