Nearly half of the UK's top ecommerce sites still losing revenue by rejecting legitimate customers

At the recent 2011 Ecommerce Fraud Forum we hosted at Vinopolis in London, 39% of the top ecommerce sites in the UK ranked ”false negatives” as the biggest challenge in their fraud prevention strategies. 

Merchants’ inability to detect fraud is the biggest fear for much fewer merchants (25%), and now causes fraud managers as much concern as data breaches & reputational damage.

Our service works by checking customer identity during the transaction to give more comfort and confidence that transactions are legitimate customers rather than fraudsters.

Mahmoud Al-Ezzeh, Product Specialist at 192business, commented on the results; “I’m not surprised that the industry is citing customer rejection as its most pressing concern.  We’re seeing many of our clients use 192business to evaluate the risk of each transaction and identify valid transactions to ensure they aren’t turning away new business.”

The other 11% of the audience were concerned about the resource they had to put behind their fraud strategy whether this was dealing with chargebacks, risk management or the review queue process.

Despite this, 55% of the audience revealed they used an internal solution to keep on top of such fraud concerns and 35% used a third party solution. 10%, however, were not currently implementing any fraud measures.

192business customer, Ben Costley at Oki-ni, who attended the forum said; “With retail fraud constantly evolving, it is imperative for oki-ni.com, as a global e-commerce retailer, to identify between fraudulent and genuine transactions.  In 192business we have found a partner that enables us to make informed decisions in a confident and timely manner.”

Andrew Mcclelland, Director of Operations & Regulatory Affairs, at industry body IMRG commented; “False positives are still a retailers worst nightmare; legitimate and probably loyal, customers having a bad experience with your brand creates bad feelings in the market place and puts fraud teams at odds with their commercial counterparts"

"It is important for businesses to get the balance right but also to view their fraud team as an important part of the marketing mix. After all, this team will have access to a wealth of information about your most loyal customers and can actually add to the bottom line, rather than being seen as a cost”

The forum also highlighted ‘friendly fraud’; international fraud gangs; data protection; and employee fraud in call centres as continuing areas of concern for online retailers.

If you would like to attend future 192business events, please contact us.