Ecommerce

E-commerce has many components. Since the main purpose is to make money you need to process credit cards. This isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do.  It also can spring some interesting surprises.

sem[c] ‘s client The Samurai Business Group presents a number of events every year. It order to improve the process both for the business and its clients we introduced Brown Paper Tickets, an online events aggregator. Samurai had maintained their own shopping cart on their website but decided it was wise to begin phasing it out for a variety of reasons. The new approach offered a better user interface, better calendaring and good attendee tracking capabilities. The only hitch was that Brown Papers Tickets required one of a set number of merchant account providers for credit card processing. Samurai’s provider was affiliated with Authorize.net.

Mary Ahart at Matrix Payment Systems got the ball rolling quickly and in less than a day we got things setup, tested and into production. So far, so good… right?

The next day we heard from Mary that their risk management TriSource Solutions LLC had discovered a problem with the Brown Paper Tickets website.

???

Incredulity was our first response.  How could a well establish company like this have missed such a problem?  Admittedly it was a bit obscure: they had included Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned companies in their list of countries in which they claimed to deliver tickets. Trisource accurately assess this as a risk and Brown Paper Tickets, when notified, quickly agreed to correct their problem. Trisource proved why Mary could cite their great track record in preventing online fraud. Your e-commerce success can all go away if you are defrauded. You are warned.