As a near year begins and daily life resumes its normalcy after multiple globally celebrated winter holidays, your brand may be reassessing its performance and fraud prevention strategies and wondering how to best prepare for future peak purchasing seasons.
Successful navigating of peak purchasing seasons primarily involves optimizing the buying experience for customers. While this is fine at a high level, how can brands implement this goal and create a more streamlined customer experience during high-demand periods? How can businesses prevent fraud and reduce chargebacks during times when transaction quantities are higher than normal?
Explore new strategies to reduce customer friction during peak shopping periods and learn new ways to manage the critical issue of fraud prevention through identity verification by following a few critical guidelines from the EVS team.
Peak Season Fraud: Understanding the Crime
Peak ecommerce purchases naturally bring an increased level of fraud attempts by cybercriminals and bad actors. According to Statista estimations, online payment fraud was responsible for $41 billion dollars in global ecommerce loss in 2022. While 2023 data has not yet been published, Statista anticipates this figure grew to $48 billion dollars last year.
Ecommerce fraud is perpetrated in a variety of ways, including:
- Account takeover fraud: This method of fraud is currently the leading cause of ecommerce loss. Account takeover fraud is a type of identity theft wherein cybercriminals take illegal control of user accounts for their own financial gain.
- Bots: Criminals are also creating more technologically advanced bots that can set up fake accounts, solve CAPTCHA requests, and make fraudulent purchases.
- Phishing scams: As if account takeovers and bots weren’t enough of a challenge, hackers are also employing phishing schemes and fake promotions that can lead to online identity theft or malware infections.
It’s easy to see that such an incredible financial loss could be devastating for large and small businesses around the world who are still struggling to overcome the current economic climate and scale their growth in the years following the global pandemic. It’s only logical that most of this ecommerce fraud was committed during peak purchasing seasons. So how can businesses combat this loss and protect their customers at the same time?
Strategies for Friction Reduction
Before you can solve a problem, you must first understand its origin and cause. Peak season friction is the collection of frustrating touchpoints customers experience while trying to make purchases during high-volume times of the year. This friction also includes overloaded company systems and shipping delays, all of which can increase customer frustration.
While it can be tempting to relax your company’s velocity and consistency rules to accommodate the higher quantity of customer transactions, doing so without adequate fraud prevention in place can open the door to a potential loss of sales, chargebacks, and negative customer experiences. Although peak purchasing seasons present a unique set of challenges, there is a clear path to reduce buyer friction: proactive management.
Mitigating loss during peak times requires proactive fraud prevention strategies, but the goal isn’t to clamp down so tightly on online identity verification that your brand loses out on gaining new customers and conversions. Peak season friction reduction requires a balance of higher shopping velocities with comprehensive identity verification solutions.
With a deep level of expertise in our corner, the EVS team compiled a list of the most critical fraud prevention strategies to help make your brand’s next peak season less worrisome and more secure.
- Streamline your checkout processes. Checkout streamlining is a highly effective method of fraud prevention. Integrating robust identity verification solutions into your onboarding allows for seamless document submission, quick verification, and satisfied customers.
- Employ automated systems. No matter how adept your customer service is, no human team can catch and stop fraud as effectively as an automated fraud prevention system. Brands can choose a fraud-prevention partner that offers enhanced automatic identity screening through integrated AI and machine learning.
- Real-time transaction monitoring. During peak purchasing seasons, your company can keep a close watch on new account creation, refusal rates, and chargeback requests.
The Role of EVS
Electronic Verification Systems, or EVS, plays a crucial role in real-time identity verification. You can achieve a harmonious balance between seamless customer onboarding and high-level fraud prevention by leveraging our comprehensive EVS solution, BlueAssure. Let’s examine how BlueAssure by EVS can enhance your business’s fraud prevention strategy next peak purchasing season.
Identity Verification and Compliance Solutions
The BlueAssure platform is a comprehensive tool that allows businesses to integrate identity verification and compliance solutions tailored to their specific policies.
Frictionless Transactions
With BlueAssure, businesses gain frictionless transactions for customers through identity verification that’s enhanced by multiple reliable data sources. This wide range of data enhances the accuracy of your identity verification while minimizing false positives.
Cloud-Based Access
BlueAssure by EVS works on a cloud-based platform, meaning your team can count on the accessibility and flexibility it needs with seamless implementation.
Real-Time Adaptability
BlueAssure enables real-time changes to every product, allowing businesses to align with evolving risk management standards and customize policies instantly.
Online Portal and API Integration
With the online BlueAssure platform, any changes you make are reflected immediately through the frictionless API, providing a dynamic and responsive system.
EVS Fraud Prevention Measures
Not only does the BlueAssure platform provide high-quality identity verification, but it can also be layered together with our other signature solutions to create the bespoke fraud protection you need. Here is a brief overview of our comprehensive fraud prevention capabilities:
Identity Verification
EVS developed our AssureID product to allow businesses to compare consumer-provided information against multiple data sources, ensuring accurate identity verification. Identity verification occurs in a single, seamless transaction, providing quick and reliable results.
Dynamic Knowledge-Based Authentication (KBA)
EVS incorporates Dynamic KBA, a method of authentication that adapts to changing circumstances and uses dynamic sets of questions to verify a user’s identity.
Fraud Alerts
The BlueAssure platform includes a system for identifying high-risk individuals through fraud alerts. Alerts can be accessed within the BlueAssure online portal or integrated into native applications using the frictionless API. These alerts are critical to identifying and preventing fraud during the pre-transaction process.
Chargeback Prevention
EVS identity verification leads to effective chargeback prevention. Chargebacks are a common, and very costly, issue plaguing online transactions. By identifying and preventing fraudulent transactions, businesses can reduce the likelihood of chargebacks.
Geolocation Verification
Geolocation can be used to confirm your customers’ locations and detect unusual activity, as well as block transactions from high-risk geographical regions.
Behavioral Analysis
With EVS solutions, your business can automatically monitor customers’ online behavior for anomalies and promptly flag and investigate any suspicious activities. This is a highly useful tool to combat cybercriminal bots.
Don’t wait for the next peak purchasing season to arrive – set your business up for success today by reaching out to the experts in fraud prevention and identity verification at Electronic Verification Systems. We can discuss your needs, provide product demos, and set you up with a custom suite of solutions you need to reduce buyer friction and prevent fraud.
