International Buyers: Opportunity or Risk?
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It almost seems like a setup. I have been itching to write about how international buyers are mistreated by so many US eCommerce sites, and then I went shopping for some telephone equipment and ended up having to jump through all knds of hoops in order to buy product.

I understand that there is a fear of fraud from international buyers, but rather than putting buyers through such a painful process, surely there must be a better way. Well, there used to be a much better way: FraudSciences. Yes, that is the startup that I used to work for, that was eventually bought by PayPal. Back in the days of FraudSciences, we helped sellers with international transactions. For some sellers, they had a policy that they simply never sold outside the US. Others had put in place a stringent set of rules for verifying the identity of a buyer overseas, or even in neighboring Canada.

The smartest of these sellers set a threshold over which they would manually verify transactions that posed undue risk. The less aggressive sellers simply closed their doors to anyone outside the US of A.

Now, I am not suggesting that sellers should take on undue risk just to enable me and my fellow ‘foreigners” to be able to partake in the great American passtime of shopping. What I am saying is that there is likely a lot of room for improvement in how sellers can find ways to enable selling cross border rather than just putting more and more senseless hurdles in the way for good buyers to be able to buy, from wherever they are.

Do you agree? Got any great verification tips for sellers that can help them enable more international sales without making international buyers use a local friend of family member as a drop-shipping warehouse?

Here are a few examples that come to mind:

  • When a buyer’s billing address and/or shipping address are a good match to their geolocation, then consider that this may be a good indication that you are dealing with the real card owner. To match the user’s IP address to the shipping or billing address, you may want to look at a company called Maxmind.
  • Another company that did something similar to what FraudSciences offered, was a company called PreCharge. Different in some ways, but essentially, they offered a guarantee to the seller that a verified transaction would be their responsibility. Thereby making it sellers more inclined to sell cross border.
  • Naturally, there is PayPal. There is lots of misinformation out there about PayPal and their ability to help you sell cross border, safely and effectively. With over 200 million accounts of which almost 100 million of them are active, you just can’t ignore the power of this payments machine. Moreover, their accounts are litterally all over the world. Have you tested them for cross border sales lately? If not, let me suggest that you test selling without requiring a local PayPal address. What a pain it is to jump through that hoop.
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