Secure business relationships start with reliable data
In today's increasingly digital and globalized business world, it is crucial for you as a company to collect and evaluate accurate information about your business partners. Especially in e-commerce, where transactions often take place quickly and automatically, this allows you to minimize risks and ensure that legal and commercial processes run smoothly.
But why is it more important than ever to obtain accurate information about business partners? A reliable data basis protects you from legal and commercial risks and ensures efficient workflows in all business processes. With solutions such as those offered by AZ Direct GmbH, you can validate and verify addresses, avoid returns, and minimise risks. This allows you to increase the efficiency of your entire business processes and lay the foundation for successful and trusting business relationships.
Criteria and solutions for secure and successful business relationships
1. Check the type of business – company or private individual?The first step in obtaining the right information about a business partner is to clarify whether they are a corporate customer or a private individual. This distinction has a significant impact on the legal framework and the risks that need to be considered in a business relationship.
Corporate customers: If your business partner is a company, B2B contract terms and special legal regulations apply—for example, management liability and the company's contractual obligations. Companies are also usually not subject to the same consumer protection as private individuals. Commercial risks such as insolvency or bankruptcy occur more frequently. It is therefore particularly important to check the creditworthiness and economic background of a company. The assessment of a corporate customer should therefore be based on credit checks and financial data analysis.
Private customers: Consumer protection rights play a particularly important role for private individuals. Buyers often have rights of withdrawal and return, which affects the reversal of transactions. On the other hand, private individuals are often unable to pay large invoices in one go. The risk of default therefore remains, but is usually lower than for corporate customers.
A key aspect of working with business partners is choosing the right payment methods. In online retail in particular, controlling payment methods is crucial to reducing the risk of payment defaults while ensuring convenience for your customers.
For business customers: Companies often prefer payment methods such as invoicing or direct debit. However, this increases the risk of payment default if you have not carried out a sufficient credit check. You can further spread the risk with payment terms such as prepayment or partial payment.
For private individuals: Secure and fast payment methods such as credit card, PayPal, or SOFORT transfer are ideal here. These payment methods enable fast processing and offer a certain degree of fraud prevention through the integration of payment service provider checks.
The right payment method control helps your company identify potential risks early on and reduce the likelihood of payment defaults.
3. Validate addresses – ensure deliverability and accuracyAnother important factor that is often overlooked is the deliverability and accuracy of the address. Incorrect or incomplete address data quickly leads to problems with the delivery of goods and delays the entire business process.
For corporate customers, it is important to correctly record the company address and branch or warehouse locations in order to avoid delivery errors.
For private customers, the delivery address plays a key role—especially for international shipments or deliveries to remote regions. Incorrect addresses not only result in higher shipping costs, but can also jeopardize customer loyalty.
Therefore, ensure that your company validates addresses and regularly checks them for accuracy and currency.
4. Assess creditworthiness – minimize economic risksThe economic risk of payment default is one of the biggest challenges in business transactions. An insolvent or late-paying business partner can severely affect your company's liquidity and lead to financial difficulties.
For corporate customers: The risk of payment default is particularly high here, as companies often order larger amounts and the solvency of the partner is not always immediately apparent. A credit check provides you with valuable information about a company's creditworthiness, payment history, and financial situation.
For private individuals: The risk is lower, but still relevant. Payment services support you with tools for fraud prevention and for checking the solvency of private individuals.
Companies should therefore always carry out a payment check before accepting large orders and set payment terms that reduce the risk of default.
Ways to get information at checkout
Today, there are numerous solutions available that allow you to obtain specific information about your business partners during the checkout process. This not only minimizes risks, but also optimizes your entire business process.
Address validation tools: Use address validation services to ensure that your delivery addresses are correct and complete. Integrating these tools directly into the checkout process minimizes the risk of incorrect deliveries.
Address verification, identification of business or private buyers: Use verification services to find out whether your business partner is a company or a private individual. The services compare the address with reference databases and check whether the business partner can be reached by post.
Credit checks and scoring systems: Use providers such as Experian, Schufa, or Creditreform for quick credit checks on corporate or private customers. These systems provide you with real-time data that you can use to reliably assess solvency.
Payment service providers with fraud prevention: Use payment services such as PayPal, Stripe, or Klarna. They offer integrated fraud prevention systems that detect suspicious payments and stop them before they are processed.
Solutions from AZ Direct GmbH
AZ Direct GmbH offers specially developed solutions that enable you to obtain specific information and minimize risks in your business processes:
Address validation to ensure address quality:With AZ Direct's powerful services, you can check the accuracy of your customer addresses, ensure smooth deliveries, avoid postal returns, and keep your customer data up to date.
As an extension to classic address validation, AZ PICK (PersonIdentificationcheCK) gives you a virtual look inside the building. This allows you to check whether the expected business partner can actually be reached at the specified address. To do this, the checkout address is compared with the AZ reference database and the appropriate delivery probability is provided for each data record. These confirmation features enable you to minimize delivery risks in the shipping process, optimally control your checkout follow-up processes, support identity management solutions, and qualify your customer database.
As its latest service, AZ BICK (BusinessIdentificationcheCK) now also allows you to verify business addresses. By combining the verification services of AZ Direct GmbH with the business data of bedirect GmbH, you gain access to over 18 million business addresses with numerous other business-relevant features. The result of the business check is not only the delivery probability, but also additional information about your customers—for example, how long the company has been known at the address, identification numbers such as the BIP or Crefo ID, industry codes, communication data, and much more.
Would you like to improve your address quality?Please get in touch with us.
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