When Boots Company plc and Granada plc unveiled www.wellbeing.com, the organisations expected the website to draw much attention from customers wanting to access information and purchase goods. However, they also realised that it would attract fraudsters interested in acquiring luxury items such as CDs, perfumes and fitness equipment. As a result, a highly scalable and resilient website with strong fraud protection was needed. They turned to ClearCommerce to support this requirement. Following an £18 million investment, wellbeing.com was launched to offer an ‘e-store’ featuring around 10,000 items.

A painful operation Boots already had some experience of online retailing having originally launched a transactional website at www.boots.co.uk. This version included a basic PC BACS link to its acquiring bank, Barclays Merchant Services (BMS) and Natwest. But once orders were received, the transactions were manually re-keyed into the pointof- sale system, making customer service a slow and cumbersome task.

Just what the doctor ordered Kevin Figgitt, third-party operations manager at wellbeing.com, said: ‘In the highly competitive world of e-tailing, success is ensured through the provision of a customer-friendly and fraud free shopping experience.’ Internet fraud doesn’t just affect customer loyalty. Because credit card purchases over the Internet are classified as card-not-present transactions, wellbeing. com is 100 per cent liable for losses, even when the bank has authorised the transaction. For wellbeing.com, the cost of Internet fraud includes direct costs, such as the costs of goods sold, bank charge-back fees and higher discount rates. There are also indirect costs, such as the cost of tracking and handling fraudulent transactions.

The remedy To combat these problems wellbeing.com turned to ClearCommerce for its Enterprise Merchant Engine, a real-time transaction processing software solution. Wellbeing.com wanted a platform that could seamlessly send transactions to BMS. ClearCommerce’s Enterprise Merchant Engine was the obvious solution as the system is accredited by BMS, which meant that time did not have to be wasted in writing software codes to enable transactions. Once the customer clicks the ‘buy’ button, the ClearCommerce transaction management software enables a real-time connection between the merchant’s storefront and the credit/debit card processors to authorise card transactions. This procedure minimises the problems caused later in the fulfilment chain, which are costly to resolve and often require intervention from customer service representatives. The ClearCommerce Enterprise Merchant Engine then implements the rules for automatic fraud protection. This includes validating the card number, checking the billing address, searching through customer history data to look for fraud patterns and to prevent duplicate orders. The system alerts the accounting and fulfilment platforms that an order has been placed and accepted for shipment and that credit/debit card settlement can now take place. This entire procedure is conducted in real time and the engine is scalable to enable multiple transactions to be processed on one server.

A healthy future with ClearCommerce Figgitt concluded: ‘Thanks to ClearCommerce, we are now effectively servicing our loyal customers without making them feel like criminals and at the same time identifying and eliminating fraudsters.’ For further information contact: Alan Scutt, ClearCommerce Europe, Tel: +44 (0)1784 430 200; Fax: +44 (0)1784 430 201; Email: ascutt@clearcommerce.com.