Last-Minute Holiday Prep

The Holidays Are Here…Are You Ready?

After months of preparation, the holidays are finally upon us.

According to the National Retail Federation, consumers are expected to shell-out roughly $682 billion between Thanksgiving and the end of 2017. That’s a modest 4% increase over the 2016 total for consumers overall; however, eCommerce’s share of the pie will see a dramatic 18% YoY increase. Is your business ready to handle that increased traffic…and increased fraud?

It’s a Wonderland…for Fraudsters.

This is one of the cardinal rules of retail: with more sales comes more risk. While the holidays are a great chance to boost your annual sales figures and grow your business, it can also be very dangerous.

Fraudsters realize that you only have so many resources at your disposal. Keeping up with the volume of sales during the holidays is a challenge, and this busy period stretches your ability to manage fraud as well as you can during the slower months. Criminals will try to take advantage of this and pull-off attacks while your attention is focused elsewhere.

You need to adopt the right strategy to defend against losses this holiday season. That calls for a comprehensive, multilayer approach to fraud management.

What is Multilayer Fraud Management?

“Multilayer fraud management” refers to a network of complementary technologies that provide comprehensive protection against fraud. An effective multilayer approach to fraud should be:

• Flexible and ready to adapt to evolving threat sources.
• Quick responding and agile.
• Built to scale alongside your business.
• Responsive to localized and region-specific needs.
• Based on both machine and human intelligence.

As the online fraud experts at Kount point out, total criminal fraud losses increased by a shocking 31% in 2016 compared to the previous year; that’s nearly double the increase in the number of sales. With fraudulent activity outpacing sales growth, the need for multilayer fraud management is greater than ever.

Some of the options available to online merchants include:

That said, no two businesses will have identical needs. For example, if you deal in digital gift cards, you might be very concerned about prepaid card chargeback threats. But, your needs will be very different from a merchant who sells physical goods in an omnichannel retail environment, or who is engaged in card-linked marketing. It’s also important to remember that the above tools are all targeted at criminal fraud sources like identity fraud and account takeover. Even with all these in place, you’ll still be open to other threat sources…like friendly fraud.

Chargebacks: Worse than Any Lump of Coal.

Chargebacks will cost online merchants upwards of $25 billion a year by 2020. Most of these chargebacks will not be related to criminal fraud; roughly 86% of all chargebacks are the result of friendly fraud.

If you let chargebacks go unchallenged, the only thing you’ll have to look forward to when January rolls around is lost sales revenue and merchandise, higher fees, and threats to your business’s sustainability. You may even be placed on the MATCH List, also known as the Terminated Merchant File, if your chargeback-to-transaction ratio grows too high, which can cripple your business.

Make proactive chargeback mitigation your New Year’s resolution with Chargebacks911®.

Chargebacks911 is the only solution provider in the industry to address all three key sources of chargebacks with specially-targeted tools and strategies:

Put your trust in the only chargeback company with a proven record of success every month of the year. Choose Chargebacks911.