Responding to the recent support issue with the locking of a transaction on our site: We of course regret a customer encountered this temporary lock (I am unaware of any that have needed 24 hours to be examined and released, I think in this case it was as much as 4 hours due to the minimal staffing on the holiday and timing of the purchase). Unfortunately, we experience higher rates of fraud on holidays as these people seem most active when they think the guard is down and we are a bit more stringent in keeping an eye on transactions. We do apologize to any of our legitimate customers that are affected and depend on their understanding that we are doing what we can to protect the innocent. We attempt to exempt any of our customers who have a purchase and payment history with our site, but on occasion it is possible for even a repeat customer to trip the system unless they have been exempted from it. Anytime a legitimate customer is affected we correct this oversight as soon as we are made aware of it.
While we do close our support on the major holidays, there is always a staff member keeping an eye on the locks of any transactions. Most are vetted and resolved within minutes. Should anyone here ever receive a support response that they feel is sub-standard please contact me personally and I will correct,
kurtj@booksonboard.com.
It helps a great deal if customers establish verified Paypal or Google accounts. Both of these payment gateways are options on BooksOnBoard. Some may recall that for the first few years BooksOnBoard did not require customers to register an address or a credit card with our site in order to do business with us or browse our site. And until publishers imposed distribution territory restrictions, as if DRM wasn’t making eBooks hard enough already, and required retailers to collect physical addresses for tax purposes from customers did we begin to. We have always tried to make buying a book from us as close to a B&M transaction as possible. But we must have some fraud protection in place.
Credit card fraud and identity theft is just an unfortunate fact of life in ecommerce and we are dealing with it as best we are able. We have never collected and stored customer payment information – credit card numbers or account numbers of any kind, and no employee at BooksOnBoard ever has access to user cc numbers or account numbers at any time. Thus it is impossible for us to ever be responsible for allowing one of our customer’s credit cards or accounts to be compromised. We do not believe our customers should need to assume even the remotest of risk so that BooksOnBoard can protect itself from occasional negative comment about our fraud prevention or so we can follow our customers every online purchase. We want your eBook business, but what eBooks you buy and read is your business.
Are eBooks a target for cc thieves?
Absolutely. Since delivery is via download and there is no physical address with delivery confirmation or tracking, none of the payment gateway providers offers any seller protections for retailers of any content delivered online. Retailers are left unprotected to absorb the losses. There is no protection from payment gateways, credit card or banking companies and we will not punish the customer who lost or had their cc stolen. No one wants to see these costs passed on to honest customers, not retailers, not the customers.