The increased risks of omnichannel commerce require attention to great care from merchants. Finding the right combination of fraud prevention and protection without turning away sales or impacting customers is a balancing act that takes time and fine-tuning. When you finally find the right balance in your fraud prevention methods, Frank Stornello, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Verifi, states that three things happen:
“First, from an ROI perspective, you don’t eat as much fraud. Second, you take more orders because you can be more accurate in determining who is high-risk and put those customers into buckets with more stringent screening. Finally, you can automate more of your order processing so that it takes fewer people to manage fraud.”
Challenges of omnichannel commerce
With the increase in omnichannel e-commerce, new demands are being placed on merchants to have a responsive and dynamic sales and merchandising system. Now, consumers expect this convergence of physical and digital commerce. When the process fails to meet their expectations, they are quick to find a merchant who can give them exactly what they want and when they want it.
Customers want a seamless experience. They want to find the item or service quickly with minimal human interaction, order it and pay for it with a few clicks, and have it delivered in a matter of as few days as possible. Along with this, though, some customers want the reassurance of a personal experience, should they have a problem with any step in this process.
For the merchant, this means that you need to be thoroughly prepared for anything this entails. This means staying on top of emails and phone calls to your customer service team with questions about products, shipping, returns, buying, etc. And let’s not forget that your customer service team also must be equipped to track these contact points with customers and keep detailed records.
What this means for you, and as Verifi’s CMSO, Frank Stornello, highlights above, is that this omnichannel sales model is both good and bad. Yes, your sales can increase; yes, your customers are happy to buy online and pick up in a brick-and-mortar location; but you now need to think more about your fraud prevention methods.
How will your current fraud prevention methods cope with these three omnichannel dimensions?
- Brick2Click: integration between online and brick-and-mortar stores, providing seamless customer support at either channel
- Device2Web: allows consumers to interact with the online store through a range of digital touchpoints
- eAve2Web: provides a smooth experience for customers who make purchases online by assigning an order ID and customer ID through a centralized database system, supporting customer service in brick-and-mortar, digital, and online channels
Achieving the ideal balance
As you’ve browsed our website and read our blog and white papers, you’ve likely learned this one important lesson: Yes, you can protect your business from fraud.
But as Frank Stornello has emphasized, all too often merchants are guilty of taking their methods of fraud prevention too far. This results in rushing to overprotect your payment process, resulting in a loss of good sales.
As we highlight in our white paper, Just Right: 3 Primary Important Lessons About Fraud Prevention from Goldilocks, you need a fraud prevention method that balances upfront protection with chargeback prevention and recovery.
At the forefront of your approach to preventing loss and maintaining sales, you should be thinking like your customers. Customers don’t and won’t put up with a rigid buying and ordering experience, but they do want the confidence that comes with knowing your solution is secure.
With the drive towards omnichannel e-commerce, this too much/too little/just right balance is a business imperative. Don’t be like Goldilocks and lose time dabbling with a fraud protection solution that is either too hot or too cold. This only results in increased fraud and chargebacks and ultimately lost sales from your overly sensitive fraud prevention methods.
When researching your ideal solution, remember the advice from Frank Stornello:
- Find a prevention method that doesn’t eat into your good sales.
- Make sure your solution has a proven screening method, allowing you to identify possible risks.
- Automation is key in minimizing the risk and error that can come with fraud prevention.
In the future, there will be more options for online security. Payments will be both more secure and more accessible with the advent of biometrics, better analytics, and the rapid decline of static passwords. Nevertheless, merchants must take care in selecting how they protect themselves against fraud.
As always, the entire Verifi team of experts is available to answer your questions and guide you in finding the solution that works for you and your customers. Both you and your customers deserve to have confidence that doing business with you is safe, secure, and simple.