Need you opinion on online payment (credit card) security

[QGR2010]

Hi,

I'm promoting a new method to improve the security of providing your payment data (credit card, bank account, alternative payment) online. From my perspective as a developer, an online merchant, and a shopper, this method makes sense, but I'd like to get your feedback on whether or not people care about this risk. Can you tell me if you...

1] select the credit card to use based on the security perception of the site/brand? i.e. I tend to use my lowest limit card for unfamiliar/unsophisticated sites.

2] hesitated or abandoned on free-trial offer that asked for your payment information?

3] hesitated or abandoned on subscription services that requires re-occurring charge on your card?

4] feel safe using your bank/checking account to pay (provide routing/acct info)?

5] have you experienced fraudulent charges / reissue credit cards in the last 2 years?

6] What if there is a proven method that allows you to protect your payment data (encryption) and lets you control when/how much the merchants can charge, at no cost to you, would you prefer using this method to pay online?

Any comments is greatly appreciated.

James Lin

[KyleXY]

I'm not sure what you mean by new security. There are a few companies that highly specialize in this area but I'd like to hear more about what you have in mind.

As for your questions, hope these help:

1] I do not select base on site or brand. Every major credit card company have charge back and fraud protection and generally in my experience, all of them are pretty good at it. Low limits or high limits have nothing to do with this. I would go with the card I normally use as it gives me the most benefits (reward type credit cards) rather than debate what card to use when making a purchase.

2] I almost never fulfill credit card info for free trial offers. There are lots of scam offers, proven by the waive of FTC crackdowns, on this very particular subject. Only a handful of sites are legitimate in this area and thus again, if I don't know the site, nothing will do to gain my trust. Not even those Verisign and TRUSTe badges. Those are easy enough to obtain.

3] I don't mind on this. You can simply cancel if you do not wish to continue service. This isn't as big of a problem but again, depends on what the subscription is for and what company.

4] Unless it was a well known company AND it was the ONLY method allowed, I would never use my bank as payment. Reference #1 and #2.

5] Not necessarily. There are already a lot of safety measures in place for merchant processing accounts, online payment methods, etc... That wouldn't influence me any more or any less than the way I already make purchases. Most consumers won't really understand the security side and no one really bother to read the terms of those things. At the end of the day, worse come to shove, you rely on your credit card company to help you fight the fraud you may face. The security on existing solutions is good enough for me the way they are. Unless something mind blowing comes my way, it's not something I would normally consider.

These are my personal opinions and of course it may differ for others. Hopefully this helps.

[QGR2010]

Hi Kylexy,

Thanks for taking time to comment. You are exactly right about average consumers being oblivious to the complexity of issues behind the scene, but I'm hoping at the very least, they don't oppose the connotation of protecting their payment data.

Can you take a look at a demo I setup and give me your thoughts (google "paymentseal"). Does it give you a neutral, positive, or negative impression/experience?

Thanks

[KyleXY]

Hi James,

Please note that this isn't a comprehensive review. Just a really quick one from first glance. I tried my best so hopefully you take this as constructive. Hope this helps.

1] Design isn't bad but it isn't great either, and technically it's broken so either it's not optimize for all browsers or it's just busted. Generally speaking design being good isn't a necessity in getting clients to work with you but having great design is more captivating and the paragraphs could use some margins or padding as well. The layout isn't bad but it's nowhere near good or ideal either.

2] The call to action on the site is weak. While it could work, it doesn't look optimize for converting customers at first glance, and I'm forced to have to read to really understand the site concept. It would be better to have a summarize call to action with description that follows instead of just description alone.

3] Not sure if the bottom footerbar is really good or bad, don't have much opinion there for the time being. I would redo the sidebar however. It's not bad to have a FB like button and other social links but it seems so out of place as well as some of the stuff in that column which I think needs to be removed from the homepage or better positioned.

4] I don't like that the demo and the forum are external on a different domain and forces you to leave the site to access it. Would be better if it was all integrated on the same domain, perhaps a video demo even.

5] Privacy Policy should be in the footer and would be best if you had a TOS there as well.

6] Some of the footer links are already in the top nav and the page isn't long enough to warrant the same links to appear in both places.

7] Not enough content or info including a missing about page.

8] I also don't like the fact that I have to download a PDF in order to get the info I need to understand what you guys do.

This is just my first impression after landing on the page and looking around for a minute or two. However typically speaking, I probably wouldn't have stayed on that long had I found that site on my own in it's current state. Sorry, hope this helps.

[QGR2010]

Hi Kylexy,

Thanks, all those are valid points I'll need to work on once I get some funding. Did you step through the demo? If this feature were available (at no extra cost to you) the next time you shop online, would you use it?

[KyleXY]

Hi James,

To answer your question first, currently it doesn't influence my buying habits. I'm confident it won't change for the mass majority either. Even assuming if this feature was available on certain sites, I'm not sure I would really pay attention to this area. In my honest opinion, from what I can tell, your business model seems to be more of a B2B relationship for any business that accepts online payments. It will act very much like a Verisign or TRUSTe badge to indicate secure payments. I could be wrong but this is just how I am looking at it from a very brief glance and overview.

With that in mind, my assumption is that it wouldn't affect consumers at all other than the value proposition of knowing their payments are secure if at all, and that the businesses are trying to validate their legitimacy and security to some degree by paying some fee to ensure security. If this is the case, a lot like TRUSTe, I believe you can make money, after all by technical definition you can generate income from anything if you know how. However I'm not sure there is a strong market fit. Consumers generally don't care or think too in-depth about these sort of things and only a small fraction of the overall online shoppers would really care about this. Of course the same thing could have been said about TRUSTe, yet they succeeded in creating a business model out of this very type of idea.

With that in mind, I think it could work, but it'd be very challenging albeit not impossible. I think the best course of action (again, assuming my assumptions thus far are true), would be to find a widely known and recognizable brand that would partner with you or have use for your service as a launchpad if it was to succeed. My best advice is if this is something you are passionate about and think has value, the best you can do is try. There's no way of knowing if something will succeed or not until you try, especially if it's something you're certain you want to try your hand at. Best of luck.

[QGR2010]

KyleXY,

Thanks for the encouraging comments. I really appreciate you taking time to analyze the strategy. I want to push this idea as far as I can within my available resources and see what happens.