Lessons to be learned:

That's what is great about this booklet. You don't have to lose to learn these lessons. If you read carefully and apply principles I am going to teach you, your online business will be a fortress against credit card theft. Thieves prey on new online stores or lazy merchants.

I hate to be a skeptic, but TRUST will put you out of business on Internet. Apathy will put you out, too.

Here are my steps to protecting yourself:

1. Do not use an automatic verification service for online shopping carts. There are many providers out there who say they will take care of your processing for you. All you do is send your customers to verification/credit card purchase page that provider gives. The money is then automatically deposited in your account. We created our own shopping cart. When we get an order, we're sent an email with a link to click on that takes us to a webpage printout of order. We then take that information, use software our merchant provider gave us and input it there for verification by modem. Your credit card verification should be either by software or by telephone verification. This gives you control of what transactions you allow to go through.

2. Take a good look at order. Does it look strange to you? Is amount a large amount? For example, is someone ordering 200 computer monitors from you? There's probably a 99% chance it's stolen. Is email address they provided from a free email service? Look at ship to and bill to addresses. Are they different? Is someone having something shipped overseas, but credit card billing information is in United States?

3. Call EVERYONE who orders from you. We get 4.9 cents a minute on our long distance, so for 25 cents to call customer and toll free number to bank that issued credit card, we verify EVERY order.

4. When calling customer, explain to them that you have seen a lot of credit card theft on your online store. Make it clear that you want to protect them. Ask them these 2 questions. They will tell you whether or not that person has that credit card in their hand:

A. Please provide me with tollfree number from back of your card. B. Please provide me with bank's name

Sometimes it is downright embarrassing. These folks are getting WAY more traffic to their site than I get to mine. I'm tempted to write back and say hey, I'll fix your conversion problem if you will show me how to get all that traffic.

Low conversion rates (the number of visitors who become paying customers) are a common situation caused by a few simple problems. Fix problems and you can expect your conversion rate to jump. There aren't many instant fixes in life, but better conversion can immediately help pay bills and put more money in your pocket.

1. Start off by putting your most popular products or services on front page. Don't make people hunt and peck through your site to find good stuff. Let them know right from start you've got something that will make them drool.

Take a look at Meredith Pond's http://CheapWriting.com She promises you good, low-cost business writing, then clobbers you with a ridiculously big promotion package you can buy for pennies on dollar.

Even if you don't go to Meredith's site to buy marketing packages, she gets your attention. You immediately understand she knows your situation and has good offers for you. That's enough to keep most people looking through her site.

2. Can you put up a delicious photo of your product? How about a picture of you or your staff providing a service? We humans are very visual beings (that's why we see color and dogs don't.)

Give average shopper nice photos of what she is looking for and you can expect a sale. I always come away hungry when I see pictures of chocolate at Nancy Davis' CandyGold.com.