Whether you run a small, medium, or large business, credit card transactions are a common instrument with which customers purchase your products and services. Unfortunately, most small businesses are susceptible to cybercrime because of the low quality of their cybersecurity defenses.
The Point of Sale (POS) or Point of Purchase (POP) may be on a virtual space such as an e-commerce website or a physical point where customers make payments to the merchant for products and services. After this, the merchant receives payment and issues a receipt for the transaction, which may be printed or sent electronically.
Don’t know what the Common Point of Purchase does? We can help. Read on to learn more about the Common Point of Purchase (CPP).
What’s the Point Of Purchase?
In our everyday financial transactions, the term Point Of Purchase is often used. However, it’s important to understand the term to have a better grasp of what common point of purchase is.
Point of purchase is the location or medium through which an end-user purchases a product or service. In simple terms, the POP could be a physical location, like a store, booth, kiosk or other physical retail outlets. This physical outlet may adopt an electronic sales system such as a telephone-based ordering service or a website. POP is often compared to POS.
The POS or POP is the particular time and location where a financial transaction is completed. At the POS, the merchant calculates the number of goods chosen by the customer and may provide an invoice for the customer.
The POS is usually referred to as the Point of Service because it is also the point where customers make their orders. Any area of a physical store that is segmented and designed to attract the attention of potential buyers through the presentation of goods and products is a POP or POS.
For example, the POP for a bouquet is a flower store, while the POP is the check-out aisle at the cash register where the customer makes payment. It’s a point of physical interaction between a customer and a product before heading to make payment at the checkout counter.
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Are There Differences Between the Point of Purchase (POP) and Point of Sale (POS)?
Apart from the subtle similarity in their pronunciation, POP and POS have some other similarities. Both POP and POS refer to the same point where a retail transaction is made, and a user buys a product.
The POP refers to the larger area surrounding the payment point, while the POP is where the actual transaction of payment takes place, from scanning goods, bagging and paying for goods shopped for.
Three Different Types of Point of Purchase
- Temporary displays: created to last for two months or a little more. These displays are often used for promotions, discounts or seasonal discounts and promotions.
- Semi-permanent displays: such kinds of displays are meant to last between three months and a year. It could also be referred to as secondary displays or off-shelf displays. A lot of designs and aesthetics go into such an attractive and better outlook.
- Permanent displays: these types of displays are built to last for years and usually an option for big brands. However, they are less common in recent times.
With the introduction of e-commerce, several entrepreneurs and startups have online stores where the process is replicated but through an online seamless process.
What’s the Purpose of the Common Point of Purchase?
The Common Point of Purchase (CPP) refers to a common financial transaction location, such as an ATM or POS terminal that debit/credit cards share. To understand how the CPP works, let’s talk a bit about how cybercriminals use credit cards to defraud unsuspecting victims. Different techniques are used to steal credit card details.
Years before now, fraudsters made use of skimming devices on ATMs or point-of-sale devices to have access to information from cards. However, with the help of evolving technologies, fraudsters now extract data from compromised or hacked databases using malware, which is powerful enough to download huge inventories of information.
This high-end technology used for cybercriminals can only be countered by advanced anti-fraud techniques. A fraudster may steal lots of credit or debit card numbers and sell them on the black market to the highest bidder.
Before Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV, also known as chip cards by consumers) were introduced, some fraudsters would use customer data to create counterfeit plastic cards, in order to quickly shop for high-price products before the cards were detected by the owner or bank and shut down. In recent times, fraudsters have turned to e-commerce or other transactions where the physical credit card is not available, due to additional cybersecurity of EMV cards physically present at the POS.
When a card is compromised by hackers, they make use of the card for high volume and low-value payment instead of high-price purchases. These transactions often move across merchants so fast that banks can’t make use of proactive measures. A common point of purchase (CPP) system can be used in identifying common points of purchases involved in a fraudulent or unauthorized payment.
A CPP is identified based on the analysis of reported fraud transactions and the last legitimate use at a common location. The time and location of a legitimate transaction and a fraudulent one is compared, in order to figure out the common point or place of purchase.
For banks, the CPP is identified through purchase CPP analysis. The analysis identifies the likely merchant location from where card numbers were stolen. This is so banks can prevent future fraudulent transactions on other compromised cards. Identified CPP among defrauded cards offers the opportunity to prevent future unauthorized use of other credit cards used at that location within a related timeframe.
How Do You Protect Your Business?
Identifying the merchant location or payment processor where a card number was stolen requires a sophisticated CPP system. This system is one that can search through a small set of fraud transactions looking for networks of shared exposures in order to find a common point where purchases occurred.
This is usually a challenging task for most banks and other businesses. However, by analyzing transactional data at regular intervals, a CPP system can gather valuable insights, some of which include identifying the point where cards were actually used for fraud, knowing the locations where those cards were likely stolen, and providing a list of cards that are at risk of being used at those same locations and timeframe.
An ideal CPP system is one where your CPP process can operate across banks and financial institutions. This is to offer strong confidence in card usage networks because banks may identify the fraudulent use of some cards at some locations before the owner of the card does. This means your CPP system should have some automated routines integrated into it with existing analytical cybercrime solutions to automatically counter any card or data breach. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a sure information security standard to protect credit cards from major credit card fraud.
Closing Thoughts
Although using both POS and POP instruments for purchase in your business can be efficient, it can also be quite overwhelming and confusing. Therefore, employing the services of a tested and trusted cybersecurity firm is a necessity. With all sorts of security breaches and cybercrimes, adhering to PCI Data Security Standards are critical to keeping your customers’ payment card data safe and secure.
RSI Security provides all the essential services to ensure your business is secure from credit card fraudsters. Some of the services RSI Security offers are security assessments, cyber risk assessment, network penetration testing, employee education, and cybersecurity training. Wish to know more? Contact RSI Security today.