Galaxy 7.8: A Focus on Web Store Fraud Security

During the Covid pandemic, your web store likely became your primary, or only ticket sales channel. Moving forward, online ticket sales will likely remain a larger percentage of your sales mix than prior to the pandemic as guests are now accustomed to using this channel. Additionally, we know from past social and economic disasters that fraud increases during times of crisis. So while we were wrapping up development of Galaxy 7.8 during the pandemic, we made sure to add significant improvements to the fraud security of the eGalaxy Web Store while maintaining a highly intuitive and satisfying online purchase experience.

But first….

Why Does Fraud Increase During Times of Crisis?

Times of social and economic distress increase the three factors that drive fraud: pressure, opportunity, and rationalization.

Almost overnight, the revenue streams of many organizations, professional fraudsters and individuals significantly reduced or entirely dried up, creating pressure to:

1. Make more money
2. Cut expenses and/or staff, or rearrange existing priorities

This created the opportunity and rationalization. The pandemic saw an increase in not only the actions of professional fraudsters, but even amateur fraudsters in need of income due to unemployment. In the chaos and uncertainty, many organizations lost focus on web security temporarily. Or, they cut expenses needed to pay for increased web security, or staff with an expertise in web security. Couple that with the increase in online traffic and sales of products due to consumers being confined to their homes, and it became easier for web fraudsters to hide.

Fraud was so prevalent during Covid that in May 2021 Visa and Mastercard rolled out policy changes across global payment processors to help combat it. Most notably, if they encounter a certain number of unsuccessful attempts to authorize a transaction on a web store in a row, a request will be sent to the processor to disable acceptance of payments due to suspected fraud.

How Can Galaxy 7.8 Help?

Payment Transaction Fraud Velocity Check

A new Payment Transaction Fraud Velocity Check has been added to the eGalaxy Web Store to prevent bots from trying to guess credit card numbers and CVV codes. If a guest (or bot) attempts to submit a transaction more times than a set number, the cart will be emptied and they will be redirected to the Error page. A Warning message will also be included in the WSLog stating that there was a possible fraud attempt.

This number of attempts setting is set to four by default, but can be edited in WebAdmin under Shopping/Checkout.

reCAPTCHA

ReCAPTCHA is now part of the core eGalaxy Web Store. With reCAPTCHA, your store leverages Google’s advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges to keep malicious software from engaging in abusive activities on your web store. Legitimate human users can make purchases while fake users and malicious bots will be prevented from engaging in abusive and fraudulent activities.

Bring your own visual ID encoder

Galaxy offers a variety of ways to encode your ticket’s visual IDs to help deter fraud, including the ability to provide your own encoding plug-in so nobody (not even GTS) can decode your visual IDs. The use of a custom-built visual ID encoder has now been expanded to include Print on Web orders for added security when making Web sales.

Improved stability and performance

There have been several updates to the eGalaxy Web Store and underlying services to improve stability and run more efficiently. This includes improved logging practices, more efficient thread and memory management, improved session handling, and better caching practices. The improvements ensure that the increased traffic that results from the shift of sales to primarily online does not compromise the purchase experience.

Improved Event Sales on the Web Store

Are you one of the many sites that have shifted to timed entry ticketing to ensure compliance with attendance limits and ensure a safe experience for guests? Are you considering keeping timed-ticketing to a certain extent?  If so then an upgrade may be in order! The eGalaxy Web Store has seen some big improvements in how it handles events, event calendars, and enforcing of holds for selected tickets.

Get more control of your Web Store

You have always had the ability to add visible content to your Web Store using the Web Store HTML. Now you can modify “hidden” parts of your Web Store as well by adding Web Store HTML elements that can be targeted for the HTML page Head section – as well as the start page body (Body Begin) and end of the page body (Body End). These new Web Store HTML elements give you the freedom to add and control custom scripts, a custom favicon (favorite icon) for your store, or analytics code. No more need to coordinate a theme update to use these advanced tools!

eGalaxy Fraud Protection

This is not specific to Galaxy 7.8, but is a service you should consider. eGalaxy Fraud Protection, in partnership with fraud management leader Accertify, allows customers to set threshold scores for various criteria associated with a potentially fraudulent transaction. As soon as the eGalaxy web order is placed, data is sent to Accertify. Accertify evaluates and scores the transaction. If the score is over the fraud threshold that the customer defines, the transaction is denied and the customer is directed to call in for assistance with the order. If the score is below the fraud threshold, the transaction is approved and sent to the payment processor.

The West Edmonton Mall onboarded eGalaxy Fraud Protection and saw almost immediate benefits.