The Singles' Day online sale on 11th Nov 2019 broke all the previous records, clocking a staggering $31.82 billion.
The world's biggest online shopping carnival saw one million new products on offer. The very first minute of the sale crossed the magical figure of $1 billion, with international buyers from the US, Australia, Taiwan and Japan joining in the Chinese shopping extravaganza in large numbers.
The steady growth in the year-on-year sales figures of Singles' Day annual online sale is a glowing example of the prolific growth that the eCommerce segment is witnessing globally.
Participation of more than 200,000 brands from over 78 countries is also a good indicator of the growth in cross-border eCommerce. Buoyed by these developments, expectations are now high that the fourth quarter selling, beginning with the upcoming holiday season in the United States, will also be a record-breaker.
Expecting a bullish shopping season in the US
The steady growth in the year-on-year sales figures of Singles' Day annual online sale is a glowing example of the prolific growth that the eCommerce segment is witnessing globally.
Participation of more than 200,000 brands from over 78 countries is also a good indicator of the growth in cross-border eCommerce. Buoyed by these developments, expectations are now high that the fourth quarter selling, beginning with the upcoming holiday season in the United States, will also be a record-breaker.
When preparations come undone
For online retailers, the peak shopping season means jaw-dropping volumes of transactions. It also means an added burden in terms of heightened online traffic and real-time decisioning—from new account creation to safe logins and secure payments. Remember, the first minute of this 11-11 saw transactions worth $1 billion?
In the post-breach era, where fraudsters have access to depth and breadth of verified consumer details, the threat of fraudulent transactions during the shopping season multiplies many times over, as fraudsters look to blend with the peak traffic. The credential-testing bots form around 90% of the traffic during heightened online activity. And then there are human sweatshops and click farms at work adding to the anxiety of the already stretched retailers.
A single lapse can jeopardize all the efforts that online retailers put into preparing for this much awaited annual shopping season and which contributes a majority of their annual sales targets. Businesses simply cannot afford any let up as that would mean colossal financial losses, as well as damage to the reputation and losing out on an opportunity to augment revenues. Therefore, online retailers that can accurately segregate fraudsters from genuine customers in all this shopping mayhem will win the day.
Address the concerns
But, how can businesses pinpoint fraudsters with certainty when these cybercriminals have all the data and tools to masquerade as legitimate customers? How can businesses be sure that the users they flag as suspicious are actually fraudsters and not genuine customers? How can they accurately review each request without slowing down the operations and disrupt customer experience? These are some of the pertinent questions for online retailers over the holiday shopping period.
Rethink your fraud remediation approach
Traditional fraud-fighting solutions cannot keep pace with the fast evolving fraud techniques. Today, fraudsters leverage the latest tools that enable them to present dynamic network addresses and spoof device forensics to fool fraud prevention teams into believing that it's a 'new' device. Solutions that rely on historical data to allow access to 'returning' customers are in for a rude shock as these could well be fraudsters impersonating legitimate customers by using their location and spoofing the device.
Online retailers, therefore, need to rethink their approach to fraud-prevention. They must look for a long-term remediation approach that strikes at the root of the fraud—it's economic worth. Arkose Labs protects leading global online retailers from the onslaught of fraud and online abuse using a unified, bilateral approach that stops fraud right at the entry gates.
Adopt a long-term approach to fighting fraud
Based on the bilateral approach, the Arkose Bot Manager platform leverages insights from a dynamic risk engine and powers a challenge-response mechanism to present targeted friction to suspicious users. This provides genuine users with an opportunity to prove their authenticity while intercepting fraudsters with unprecedented accuracy.
Arkose Bot Manager leverages data from billions of user transactions and analyzes them across a range of parameters to identify risky profiles. Based on these insights, the challenge-response mechanism intelligently presents adaptive step-up challenges. The graduated friction requires fraudsters to spend more time and resources trying to clear the challenges, which breaks their fraud business model and makes the attack progressively less attractive.
In the absence of adequate return on their investments, fraudsters are left with no choice but to abandon the attack. Genuine customers feel no disruption to their online shopping experience and continue to shop freely with an assurance that they are in safe hands.
With the correct strategy in place ecommerce companies can ensure they maximize the potential of the busiest annual shopping spree to date; delivering a secure and seamless online experience for their growing customer base.
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