Stalked By The Mouse

Ganesh Lakshmanan, 31, an upwardly mobile media executive and a regular online shopper, one day found an unexpected amount of Rs 732 recorded in his credit-card statement. On enquiries with his bank, he found that it was a fraudulent entry. Some prankster had lifted the information off the Net and partied on his money! Mahesh Tripathi was not as lucky. He was billed Rs 5,000 extra for things he'd never bought. Although both Lakshmanan and Tripathi never had to pay up, it was a nightmare still. The experience has left both of them rather rattled.
Is this the dark underbelly of shopping on the Net—the latest exciting buying option? Is this the price one pays for shopping from the comforts of one's air-conditioned office or the easy chair of the drawing room, any time of the day, night or week? Sure you can compare prices at a click, browse without having to run around or being jostled. But at what cost or risk?
There are real risks in online transactions, agree merchants and banks. Citibank, the biggest in the credit card business, agrees that there have been several cases where hackers have stolen sensitive information on people's personal and credit details. This has led to loss of both money and, more significantly, confidence in e-commerce in customers, merchants and banks alike. But that doesn't mean it's the end of the world for e-shopping. Citibank says that if customers and merchants follow some simple suggestions, such frauds can be virtually eliminated (See Dos and Don'ts). The early adapters are already buying quite regularly on the Net though purchases are generally for low-value items, typically books and music.
www.fabmart.com, one of the foremost e-tailers today, claims to receive 500 orders a day—out of which just 25 are for jewellry, the rest equally shared between books and music. Few orders are over Rs 5,000. "But 60 per cent of them prefer to pay by credit cards," says K. Vaitheeswaran, vice president, marketing.
"Public perception of the problem is larger than life," feels G.B.S. Bindra of www.firstandsecond.com, claimedly India's biggest bookshop on the Net. E-commerce may have just as much risk of fraud as physical transactions. Both fabmart and firstandsecond claim that so far none of their clients have complained. On the contrary, fabmart feels that e-commerce transactions can be better protected. The company, for instance, asks customers for personal details like date of birth which is used for verification in case of high value orders. The company actually identified a potential fraud with this system once. A few high-value orders came around the same time on a particular credit card number which alerted the company. Tracing the consignee order, the fraudsters, who had got the credit details of the customer at an exhibition stall, were identified. "You could not have traced a physical fraud this easily," says Vaitheeswaran. A person shopping physically actually displays his credit information to many more people than while e-shopping. But our mindset allows us today to use the card more freely in physical situations.
"The onus of proof in case of a fraud is on the merchant and the bank that acquired the transaction," explains Subir Mehra, head, e-team, Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. So if there is no proof that you initiated the transaction, you are pretty safe. Mehra feels that online shopping is facing such a block from Indian consumers because we have never had a mail order culture earlier.Markets like the US, which have traditionally flourished on this culture, have moved to Net buying with relative ease.
Even while merchants and banks put up a brave public face, they do privately caution customers not to use their credit cards online. Kaveri Mukherjee, 34, a researcher, wanted to make a dollar payment to an American organisation. But her bank advised her against using her international card despite the fact that making a dollar draft could be a laborious process. Nirupama Narendranath wanted to make a payment equivalent of Rs 20,000 to a travel company as she had just won a nearly-free trip to Florida, but decided against it when her bank strongly advised her not to use her card.
On their part, online retailers and banks are doing everything to make the e-shopping environment more secure and reliable. Merchants like fabmart use the Secure Socket Layer (ssl) technology for encrypting customer data. This data is decrypted at the company's server and hence, these merchants claim, no one can access this information while it is in transit over the internet. Firstandsecond stores credit card information on a machine that is not connected to the internet. While Citibank offers the country's first web credit e-card, icici and hdfc offer debit cards. Citibank's e-card has no actual plastic. It's only for online or mail order shopping and the customer can choose his own credit limit. This helps him feel secure about fraud and is therefore a huge notional benefit. Citi's e-card comes with an insurance cover for best price, an extended warranty for electrical and electronic goods and a purchase protection against damage or loss due to fire or theft. So whenever you want to purchase on a site, you go directly to your bank over an ssl link and follow this up with a confidential personal identification number.

To allay the consumer's fears, sites are also continually adding payment modes that include debit cards and direct savings account debits, besides credit cards and vpp and cheque or cash on delivery of items like groceries. Then there are smart or pre-paid cards like fabmart's Fabmoney. You can buy this pre-paid currency that comes with a random, 17-digit identification number in a tamper-proof pouch from cybercafes in six metros and purchase against it on the site. The smart card/debit card option helps the non-credit card holder the option to buy on the Net besides taking care of security concerns. "Cybercrime is an accepted reality in every country," says a Citibank spokesperson. Every country therefore needs to monitor activity that may threaten customers. The Indian Information Technology Act is expected to be a strong step forward in regulating the working of the internet in India while providing a framework for its use. Estimates of the B2C business this year range from Rs 13 to 50 crore and projections for the next year again range from Rs 30 to 300 crore. It obviously is very nebulous and how the industry grows may have a lot to do with how merchants promote the business.
But once bitten may be twice shy. It may be a while before Ganesh, otherwise a classic early adapter, will go back to Net shopping. Says he: "The experience has shaken me up not so much for the money I could have lost but for the feeling of being stalked." Such experiences travel rapidly by word of mouth, often to the annoyance of the merchants and banks. So the process may be as long as it took India to take to credit cards. But there may be no harm in going to the Net as a responsible and informed customer.Think of the pleasures and do your spadework for it. It may be well worth it.