Shopping behaviors during the holiday season are different than during the rest of the year; this brings with it greater revenue and greater risk for e-commerce sites. The Riskified report, “Unwrapping Holiday Fraud: Insights to Protect Your Business & Drive eCommerce Revenue,” shows sales volume from legitimate online shoppers far outpaces growth in fraud attempts, despite an influx of typical risk indicators of actual fraud unique to the holiday season. Fraudulent tactics include tactics like shipping to another address, an increase in international shoppers and mixed-cart fraud.
Mixed-cart fraud is where a person adds a few physical goods to their shopping carts with the victim’s actual shipping address and then adds a digital gift card to be sent to the fraudster’s email address. Since the order of physical goods matches normal patterns, the order often seems legitimate. However, when these orders are approved, the cardholders receive items they did not order, and the fraudsters keeps the digital gift cards, with the victim being sent the bill.
While the top e-commerce retailers like Finish Line, Wayfair, Prada and Ring rely on the company’s AI-powered fraud-prevention solutions to instantly and accurately distinguish legitimate customers from fraudulent ones – boosting conversion rates and the bottom line – smaller companies are far more exposed. The dilemma for smaller companies is that many orders around this time are of a high value, meaning it can be challenging to assess which orders are ‘real’ and which are ‘fake’.
Every company offering an online service needs a new line of defense. In today’s era of speedy online transactions and one-click purchasing, the ability to adapt to combat fraud has never been more important for the viability of merchants, particularly as retailers jump into the make-or-break holiday sales season.
