Merchant Newsletter - November 4, 2006

Holiday e-Cards coming early this year!

This guy got the Christmas card with the virus!

 
At St Croix Weaving, we hand-weave any Scottish tartan in silk and cotton for apparel and table linens.  In silk we make scarves, shawls, sashes, evening bags and scarflaces.  In cotton we weave table runners, placemats, napkins, bar towels, large table squares, golf towels and a great shawl.  We sell mostly at Scottish festivals around the country and thru our internet site:  www.stcroixweaving.com  We are unique in that we are the only ones (that we can find) in the US who hand-weave tartan.  We are members of the Scottish Tartan Authority where we get the registered colors and thread counts.  They ran an article on us in the last February Tartan Herald.


We use your Pocket Verifier Pro software on Sprint Treo 300 (Palm) and Tmobile iMate PDA2K (Windows Mobile) pocket PC phones with the Pocket Merchant Card Reader and Printer.  It's the perfect solution for our home based business which is selling on the road at Scottish festivals.



New security rules are causing merchants to periodically change their passwords.  There is an online interface to do this, here.  Please note that where it says "Check Account", they are looking for, as security, your CHECKING ACCOUNT NUMBER.  Many merchants have mistaken this as a confirmation field, and they re-enter their Merchant ID.

Most importantly, When you change your password, enter it in UPPERCASE as a MiXeD case password will not work with Mobile or PC swiped software products. You need to use at least one number and symbol, here are some examples:

These will work- 
ABCD1234$
$BUCKAROO1
1GOODTIME4$

These will NOT work:
AbCD1234$ (a lowercase letter)
BUCKAROO1 (no Symbol)



e-Cards are getting more and more popular these days.  e-Cards can be a handy way to send a quick thank you, sorry, or thinking of you message -- as well as a cheap and easy emergency fix when you forget a special occasion, they can also reduce the stacks and stacks of handwritten cards:

 

Most e-Cards you receive from friends are safe and easy to use. However, since there are quite a few e-Card scams going around right now, we want to help you make sure you don't become an e-Cards scam victim. This is especially important since the holiday season is perfect for e-Cards scams -- Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Years.

One common e-Card scam involves e-Cards that download adware or spyware -- and they get you to agree to this in the fine print when you click saying you accept the Terms of the e-Cards company!  Remember, building an e-card site and service is not trivial, so if they are doing it for free, there HAS to be a catch, either in ads, adware, or to use trojans to collect your private info!

A legitimate-looking e-Card, once it is clicked and/or downloaded, might actually be spyware or a computer virus.  For example, your computer then may start displaying obscene images, barrage you with pop-up ads, launch adult websites, or start sending bogus e-Cards to those in your address book that appear to come from you. Talk about the gift that keeps on giving!


So you followed all of our suggestions, shipping ONLY to the AVS verified address of the cardholder, only to find out that the shipment was "redirected" to a mail-forwarding address, and is now on its way to Nigeria!  While this has not happened to any of our merchants (that we know of), "now" seems like a good time to arm our merchants with a preventative measure.

To prevent this, when shipping high dollar or high-fraud/theft items via UPS, request "Adult Signature"  instead of standard signature. This adds 75 cents to the service, but could save you thousands. Their rules do not allow redirection of "Adult Signature" shipments.  In addition, just to make sure some helpful UPS employee does not "help" the customer override the safeguards, write "NO ADDRESS CHANGE - NO REDIRECTION" in the Reference number AND Address 3 / Department field (assuming you are using UPS Worldship.  

You will need to judge for yourself if the possible inconvenience to your customers, as well as the added cost to you is commensurate to the extra level of fraud protection.


A pair of British twin boys has been born with different skin color, a rare genetic occurrence according to experts:

This is a genetic one-in-a-million event, although we wonder if one of them happens to resemble the mailman.

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