Hello everyone and welcome to today’s workshop on How eBay Sellers and PayPal Team Up to Reduce Risky Transactions. My name is Larry Friedberg and I manage PayPal Trust & Safety Marketing.

PayPal is committed to your security. We offer some of the lowest fraud rates in the industry, use industry leading technology to stop most fraud before it affects your business, offer issue resolution, and, whenever possible, partner with you to fight fraudulent chargebacks. A new feature we launched as a limited release in the US and CA last week is Payment Review which is an early warning system designed to let sellers know when we’ve flagged what we believe to be a high-risk transaction. Sellers who come across Payment Review are urged not to ship the item until the investigation has completed. Here’s a link to the AB Board post, in case you missed it:

Link

Payment Review is free to sellers and automatic (no sign up required). I’d like to point out that merchant accounts do not offer this type of functionality.

Today, I’m joined by many of the folks on the PayPal Risk Management team who are focused on protection for sellers. They have expertise on chargebacks, buyer complaint issues, issue resolution and other issues we know that many of you confront in your businesses on a regular basis. Our job is to make sure that the eBay and PayPal community has the tools, resources and insights to help reduce the burdens of online risk in a way that results in your topline and bottom line growth.

During today’s workshop, we’re going to answer your questions and offer tips about how to minimize your online risks. Of course, since every business is unique, we recommend that you adopt the practices and tools that best fit your business.

Let’s get your questions.

Thanks for joining!

Larry

Let me go through some FAQs related to Payment Review:

1. What is Payment Review?
Payment Review is a new feature that highlights potentially risky transactions to merchants and allows them to reduce risk to their businesses. If a payment is deemed to be a high-risk transaction, PayPal notifies the merchant to hold the shipment of that order. Within 24 hours PayPal reviews the payment and either approves or reverses it. If the payment is approved, PayPal advises the merchant to ship the order. If the payment is not approved, PayPal informs the merchant, helping them avoid losses associated with replacing merchandise and the cost of shipping for that order.

3. Will PayPal review transactions for all merchants in your system?
No. Currently Payment Review will be in limited rollout for some of our merchants in the US and Canada beginning this week. Assuming all goes well in the initial rollout, the plan is to make it available to increasing numbers of our merchants in the US and Canada as well as those in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia within the coming months. We expect to roll the feature out to more countries worldwide in 2008.

5. If none of my transactions are flagged for Payment Review, can I assume that they’ve cleared PayPal’s fraud models?
No. Merchants should always be vigilant about payments and should implement the risk prevention strategy that is best for their businesses. Payment Review is just one additional feature merchants can use to help them reduce risk.

6. Aren’t you sending a mixed message here? If merchants do not know if they are part of the program, how will they know if their payments will potentially be flagged?
We don’t think so. We have to strike a balance between notifying buyers and sellers of our fraud prevention techniques, while not tipping off fraudsters to our methods. If we communicate exactly how and when buyers and sellers will see Payment Review, fraudsters may figure out ways to get around it.

Merchants should always be vigilant about payments and should implement the risk prevention strategy that is best for their businesses – Payment Review doesn’t change that. Payment Review is just one additional feature merchants can utilize to help them manage risk.

7. What are the criteria used to determine if a transaction will be reviewed?
While we can’t be specific about criteria, Payment Review uses PayPal’s internal fraud and risk models to identify high risk transactions.

8. Is this available on and off eBay?
Yes. Transactions on and off eBay will be reviewed under Payment Review.