If Google Checkout walked into Cheers, it would certainly be comfortable. Everybody would know its name.

Google was named the most-popular brand in the world, in Millward Brown's 2nd annual Brandz ratings released in April 2007. Even the Oxford English dictionary added the verb "to google" in the 2006 version, making the brand name synonymous with Internet searching.

Google hopes to add shopping to that connotation, with Google Checkout.

Now, merchants can leverage the significant power of the Google brand with CardinalCommerce.

"Cardinal is pleased to add Google Checkout to Cardinal Centinel, our merchant platform that enables multiple payment brands with one easy integration," says Mike Keresman, CEO, CardinalCommerce. "Google Checkout is proving to be a major player in the eCommerce space and we're happy to provide this new value to merchants."

With many online purchases resulting from online searches, Google Checkout is a way to convert browsers into buyers. Another powerful payment brand in Cardinal Centinel's arsenal, Google Checkout helps merchants attract more leads, convert more leads into sales, and to protect against fraud.

Google Checkout is a checkout process that merchants can quickly integrate into their site, using Cardinal Centinel, the Universal Merchant Platform, alongside existing checkout options, enabling customers to buy online quickly and securely, using a single user name and password.

Through Cardinal Centinel merchants can expect a fast, easy and simple integration of Google Checkout. It is even simpler to enable Checkout when a merchant is already using Centinel.
 
Acting as a safe, secure "e-wallet" and address book, Google Checkout allows consumers to select from a variety of payment types and ship to a variety of addresses. All purchases made through Google Checkout are aggregated to one page for easy viewing, and reference, for the purchaser.

Google Checkout works with Google AdWords to make it easy for customers to locate websites that have the products or services they want to buy or use. Through the use of the Google Checkout badge, Google Checkout merchants can be quickly identified by potential customers.

Google is also offering many significant incentives to prospective merchants.  Processing on all Google Checkout transactions for the remainder of the year is free. In addition, Google is providing merchants currently using Google's AdWords a way to earn free processing consistently through Google Checkout sales.

Interested in learning how Cardinal Centinel and Google Checkout can grow your business?

Contact CardinalCommerce Merchant Services
at 877-352-8444 or email Salesupport@CardinalCommerce.com today to find out!

May's edition of  "The Adverse Effects of Fraud Screening: Are you Forfeiting Customers?" detailed the inefficiencies of manual review and offered the addition of authentication services as a solution to navigating the complex and problematic world of order acceptance processing.

In this issue, we'd like to examine instances in which orders were deemed acceptable, after time and money spent on order review and, then, despite preventative measures, still ultimately resulted in a chargeback or a return to the merchant.

Ah, the dreaded chargeback.
 
As many merchants know too well, when a customer calls their card-issuing bank to dispute a charge on their billing statement, the banks deem the merchant liable for fraudulent charges, regardless of the merchant's previous fraud-screening efforts. The customer's card-issuing bank will directly contact the merchant's acquiring bank, and the acquiring bank will, in turn, post the chargeback to the merchant's account.

The effect of a chargeback is often a one-two punch to the merchant. First, the merchant feels the financial hit of both losing the goods that were sold, and receiving a monetary fine for the chargeback. Second, businesses receive a strike against their merchant account. Cumulative strikes against merchant accounts are significantly painful. If a merchant receives what the card associations deem an excessive amount of chargebacks in a given timeframe, merchants can quickly find themselves on a "watch list", or Global Monitoring Program, putting their account, and business, directly at risk.

Today, 78% of all fraud-coded chargebacks are never recovered, according to Cybersource's 8th Annual Online Fraud Report.

Isn't there any recourse for merchants who have done extensive (and expensive) manual review, and still receive chargebacks? Sure, there is. It's commonly called the re-presentment process, and upon examination, it's not an easier, or cheaper, battle to wage.

Merchants need to make a case to directly address each and every chargeback situation.  Of course, this takes more time and more money. Merchants typically spend 1.8 hours, on average, according to Cybersource, handling each individual chargeback, in terms of time consumed by research, documentation, and submission.

A proactive, prevention-first policy for chargebacks is clearly in the merchant's best interest to adopt. Today's tools in the fight against chargebacks include the card association's own authentication programs, known as Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. These programs provide additional security to merchants by offering chargeback protection. In fact, Visa even offers chargeback blocking on authenticated orders; when a shopper successfully authenticates herself with her PIN number through use of the Visa program, and subsequently "charges back" the order, the merchant's acquiring bank never even sees the chargeback - it is technically blocked before ever reaching the bank. Now that's protection.

Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode are the highest form of chargeback protection available to eCommerce businesses today, and Cybersource reports that 16% of all eCommerce merchants plan to implement the programs this year, making authentication the most sought-after fraud detection/prevention tool of 2007.

RETURNS

As Cybersource notes in their Annual Online Fraud Report, "chargebacks are only half the problem." To help further assuage the vicious assault of large volumes of chargebacks, and to avoid being penalized by Visa and MasterCard's card associations, many merchants have employed an extremely liberal return policy, allowing customers to come directly to them, instead of the associations, to dispute charges.

These liberal return policies cause merchants to lose significant revenue, doing more damage to the merchant bottom line than the hit of a chargeback. In fact, Cybersource estimates that fraud loss due to chargebacks accounts for less than half of all of fraud claims, for any size merchant. If a merchant is only using chargebacks as a metric when evaluating its rate of fraud, the number can be greatly skewed. The actual fraud rate may be up to two times higher when factoring in direct consumer credits for returns.

Chargebacks and returns are often viewed as the built-in cost of doing business online, but with proven fraud solutions, like authentication, implemented on eCommerce sites, this doesn't have to be the case.

Today, authentication can be merchant's greatest ally in the fight against online fraud, and prevent the continued assault, in the form of chargebacks and returns, on the merchant's bottom line.