Don’t Let Fraud Losses Surprise You

4. Practice risk management. Managing payment risk protects you against losses from chargebacks. It also improves the trust in your platform by weeding out bad merchants that lead to bad buyer experiences. Trust and excellent buyer experiences reduce churn and accelerate growth.

5. Don't wait. Fraud is unlike most business phenomenon because it's highly nonlinear. You can have zero fraud one week and be in an all-out attack the next. One company found that its fraud attack was being spurred by a fraud blog post explaining how you could make a quick $500 off its site. Don't let this happen to you.

Even if you don't see any fraud today, you need to have at least basic defenses and a rapid response capability in place to be prepared. Of course, alternatively, there are many providers whom you can use so that you don't have to take on this burden yourself.

So, while you might not undertake all five of the tips above, the important thing is to start thinking about the possibility and putting in place some measures to assure the trust and safety of your online platform.

John Canfield is the vice president of risk for WePay, a payments API provider.