After months of concern over whether inflation-weary consumers would be willing to spend when the traditional start of the holiday shopping season rolled around, consumers showed up — big time — for the stretch from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.

Online sales were up 8% for the five-day affair, with a big year-over-year increase in discount use fueling the shopping frenzy. Online orders with discount codes attached increased by 38% during the Cyber Five compared to last year, peaking at 46% higher on Black Friday and reaching 43% higher on Cyber Monday.

Sales were solid to strong throughout the long weekend increasing by 4% on Thanksgiving,  11% year over year on Black Friday, 7% on Saturday, 8% on Sunday and 7% on Cyber Monday. 

Consumers in survey after survey indicated that they would be looking for bargains this holiday season and online brands and merchants apparently delivered. 

“Consumers have been saying that value is especially important to them this holiday season,” Signifyd Chief Customer Officer J. Bennett said. “Merchants have heard that message and responded. And for their part consumers have said, ‘These discounts represent true value. Now is the time to buy.’”

Popular discounts were the key to Cyber Five success in 2023

A look at discounting by day indicates how important markdowns were to the success of Cyber Five 2023. Besides the big boosts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, shoppers used 31% more discount codes on Thanksgiving than they did in 2022, 29% more on Saturday and 32% more on Sunday.

The traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping period (which now starts in earnest in October) provided some other encouraging signs. Holiday shoppers returned to categories that had traditionally been gift-giving favorites, but showed some weakness in October. 

Luxury goods, beauty and cosmetics, apparel, alcohol, tobacco and cannabis, and leisure and outdoor goods all experienced double-digit year-over-year percentage growth during the Cyber Five. Grocery was also up double digits. Electronics continued to struggle, with sales down 2% year over year. 

The 8% overall spending increase was double what Signifyd had projected in early October and dramatically outpaced the expectations of other experts as well. The question now becomes whether the expectation-shattering performance was the sign of things to come — or whether it means consumers’ gift-shopping budgets are now exhausted for the season. 

Did the big Cyber Five success merely pull December sales forward?

“I’ll be curious to see how much of the Cyber Five spending was a pull-forward from December,” Bennett said. “If I had to project right now, I’d say November is going to end stronger than we projected, and December will fall a little short of expectations. Consumers have said they have a set budget for the holidays. They’re just searching for the best value, the best place to spend that money.”

Whatever the case, it could mean online brands and merchants will need to keep offering discounts to keep customers coming back. There are any number of ways the data from the Cyber Five demonstrates just how important discounts were in the success of the annual festival of shopping.

For the whole of Cyber Five, consumers included discount codes with 29% of the orders they placed. That figure ranged as high as 32% on Sunday and never went lower than 25%, which is where it sat on Thanksgiving Day.

The markdowns had the effect of lowering prices during the Cyber Five. A Signifyd analysis that compared prices for 175,000 goods during the first half of the year to what they were during the Cyber Five. The study found average prices were 11% lower over the long weekend effectively neutralizing inflation. The average size of the discounts themselves ranged from a high of 19% on Black Friday to 3% on Sunday.

Fraud appeared to take a holiday break during the Cyber Five 

Among the weekend’s many bright spots: Fraud pressure — or the number of orders Signifyd deemed to be fraudulent — dropped by 20% over last year’s Cyber Five. The figure was a welcome one, given that U.S. merchants faced a massive fraud attack during holiday 2022. An organized fraud ring last year made off with an estimated $660 million in goods from online retailers nationwide while attempting fraudulent purchases of more than an estimated $3 billion in products. 

A deep dive into the Cyber Five’s daily numbers

Thanksgiving offered the slowest day of year-over-year sales growth during the five days.

Black Friday led in sales growth, as it should be for the day that historically has been synonymous with shopping until you drop.

*Fraud pressure is defined by the fluctuation in the number of transactions that Signifyd models deem very risky.

Saturday matched the sales growth of Cyber Monday, but remember the sales volume was not even close, meaning the growth was on a much smaller base. 

*Fraud pressure is defined by the fluctuation in the number of transactions that Signifyd models deem very risky.

Sunday showed strong growth, but see “sales volume” above. 

*Fraud pressure is defined by the fluctuation in the number of transactions that Signifyd models deem very risky.

Cyber Monday ensured that the Cyber Five 2023 finished strong. 

*Fraud pressure is defined by the fluctuation in the number of transactions that Signifyd models deem very risky.

Methodology 

Signifyd’s Holiday Season Pulse Tracker data is derived from transactions on Signifyd’s Commerce Network of thousands of ecommerce retailers and brands. Commerce Network intelligence also powers Signifyd’s Commerce Protection Platform, which leverages AI-driven machine learning models and data from millions of transactions to detect and block fraudulent activity. Signifyd has seen more than 600 million unique shopper wallets globally, meaning that 98% of the time when a shopper comes to a Signifyd-protected site, Signifyd’s machine-learning models recognize the shopper instantly. For a tutorial explaining the methods and meanings behind Signifyd’s Holiday Season Pulse Tracker visit Signifyd’s YouTube channel.

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Sales for the day, the once-traditional kickoff of the holiday shopping season, were up 11% over Black Friday 2022, with gift-friendly verticals, such as beauty and cosmetics, alcohol, and apparel leading the way.

Data from Signifyd points to the key role good deals played in the double-digit growth. The number of online orders placed with a discount was up 46% over last year. In all, 26% of online orders on Black Friday were marked down by discount, compared to 21% last year.

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With an estimated 25% of Black Friday sales in the books, Signifyd Holiday Season Pulse Tracker data showed daily sales falling just short of the current season average, which has sales up 6% between Oct. 1 and Black Friday over the same period last year. 

The good news for retailers is that Black Friday sales show consumers are prepared to spend on holiday gifts and related items as long as they can find a good deal. Signifyd Data Analyst Phelim Killough said the promising start to Black Friday might ultimately mean that the Cyber Five — Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday — would outperform Signifyd’s projection of a 4% increase in sales. 

Discounts appear to be the key. In fact, 28% of Black Friday ecommerce orders were accompanied by discount codes by mid-day, up from 22% a year ago. Those discounts averaged a savings of more than 29% for shoppers, up from 24.5% last year. 

“Consumers have been telling us for weeks that they would be looking for deals this holiday season. What we’re seeing on Black Friday and on Thanksgiving is that they are true to their word,” Killough said. “We’re also seeing that retailers who really understand their customers are providing significant value during what for many of them is the most important quarter of the year.”   

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The slower-than-expected start to the crucial fourth quarter prompted Signifyd to lower by a percentage point its initial projection that the three-month holiday shopping period would finish with sales 5% higher than holiday 2022.

Online spending in the U.S. was up 4% over a year ago in October, according to Signifyd data. That’s significantly short of Signifyd’s initial projection of a 7% sales increase. Signifyd analysts noted that robust apparel sales failed to materialize and that early-season promotions — including Amazon Prime Day — didn’t ignite the same level of buying enthusiasm that experts expected.

Key takeaways from Signifyd’s October holiday ecommerce sales data

For a look at how October’s numbers provide a snapshot of a holiday season that continues to defy expectations, consider the following conclusions drawn from Signifyd’s monthly Pulse report: 

• Disappointing ecommerce sales in October will temper the year-over-year increase in online holiday sales this fourth quarter. Signifyd’s latest projection calls for ecommerce sales to increase by 4% during Q4, rather than by 5% as it originally forecast.
• Amazon Prime Day did provide a halo effect for retailers other than Amazon. Unfortunately for those retailers, the boost lasted about 24 hours, rather than providing the multi-day sales increases that Prime Day had provided in the past.
• Apparel sales were flat in October compared to a year ago. That was far below the 9% increase Signifyd had predicted for the month.
• Consumers more enthusiastically embraced discounts this year, increasing the portion of orders accompanied by discount codes from 22% in 2022 to 25% this October. That two percentage point increase in deals contributed to tamping down overall revenue.

“When I talk to retailers, what they saw with consumers, was that the pull-ahead with Amazon and the early-days-kind-of-sales, there was some success there, but not nearly as much as they projected,” Signifyd Chief Customer Officer J. Bennett said. “What we saw was that Prime Day actually had a really good halo effect across the ecosystem, but it was only about 24 hours. In previous years, that halo effect actually wasn’t so concentrated.”

Prime Day’s ‘halo effect’ was not so shiny in October 

Amazon’s Prime Day typically prompts other merchants to offer competing promotions and creates a national buying event across ecommerce, whether Amazon is doing the selling or not. Prime Day, Oct. 10, did see the month’s largest daily increase in year-over-year sales on Signifyd’s Commerce Network, but the upswing lacked the staying power of Prime Days past. By October 11, sales had fallen back to where they were earlier in the week, an indication that consumers weren’t as anxious to buy early as retailers expected.

“We didn’t see that as much this year,” Bennett said. A portion of consumers appear to have said, “I’ll wait,” Bennett added. “There’s no reason to buy right now.”

Signifyd downgraded its forecast for the holiday season in light of October’s miss. It’s now projecting that online sales from Oct. 1, through December will be up 4% rather than the 5% it predicted in early September. Signifyd bases its projections on recent transaction and growth trends and seasonality factors. When those elements change, the projections do, too.

Slow apparel sales a major culprit in Signifyd lowering its holiday sales expectations

Slow apparel sales contributed significantly to the gap between Signifyd’s October projection and actual sales. While Signifyd’s forecast predicted a 9% increase in apparel sales for the quarter over last year, sales were in fact flat for the month.

“We actually projected that apparel would have a breakout year this holiday season,” Bennett said. “I’m still projecting that for November. It’s just not happening in the earliest part of this holiday season.”

The holidays will play out differently by retail vertical

But as always, the story will vary by retail vertical. While apparel had a disappointing month, online grocery sales were up 26% year over year — owing in part to stubbornly high prices. Sales of products in the alcohol, tobacco and cannabis category increased 19% and leisure and outdoor goods sales were 14% higher than last October.

Was Singles Day weekend a sign of better things ahead?

For the glass-half-full crowd, data from online sales over Singles Day weekend — Nov. 10 through 12 — provides evidence that consumers are still ready to buy for special occasions. That’s only right given that Singles Day is a declaration of optimism and happiness in the face of those who believe being a couple is a requirement on the road to fulfillment. 

While momentum for Singles Day sales has been building in the U.S. in recent years, the China-born shopping holiday celebrating the romantically unattached clearly made a mark in 2023.

Online sales of “treat yourself” items in the beauty and cosmetics vertical and the luxury vertical had strong showings during the Singles Day weekend, according to data from Signifyd’s Live Holiday Season Pulse Tracker. Sales in both verticals from Nov. 10 through Nov. 12, were up 9% over last year’s Singles Day weekend.

Singles Day, celebrated on Nov. 11, originated in China in the 1990s and has grown globally into the largest shopping day of the year. Nov. 11, which is also Veterans Day in the United States, has been growing as a prominent shopping day in the U.S. In recent years, more U.S. retailers have offered promotions linked to Singles Day.

Singles Day bounce was in full force

This year, overall online sales in the U.S. increased 5% over the Singles Day weekend compared to a year ago, Signifyd data shows. That boost was in keeping with higher sales for the holiday season, which are also up 5% year-over-year. However, when compared to a typical holiday shopping season weekend, the Singles Day bounce was evident — sales were 10% higher than the first weekend in November and 22% higher than the second weekend in October. 

Bigger Singles Day basket sizes also matched the overall holiday shopping season, which began Oct. 1. Average order values for the season so far and for the Singles Day weekend, both came in at up 1%.

Interestingly, AOV in the beauty and cosmetics category declined 3% over a year ago, as shoppers turned to discounts to stretch their shopping budgets. Maybe when buying for oneself, money is indeed an object. The share of sales accompanied by discount codes reached 57% in the beauty and cosmetics category over the weekend, Signifyd data shows. Last year only 31% of sales in the category were rung up with a discount code attached.

Luxury sales were a different story, with discount codes increasing only 5% over last year, while average order value in the luxury category soared by 32%.

Singles showed themselves to be bargain hunters

Overall, one-fifth of all online transactions arrived with a discount code over the Singles Day weekend. And those deals were good ones. In fact, the size of the discounts provided by merchants over the weekend increased by 6% over last year. For all of November so far, the discount size was up only 2% over a year ago.

Despite the flurry of shopping activity over Singles Day weekend, fraud pressure — or the measure of orders deemed very risky by Signifyd — declined by 25%. That’s in contrast to fraud pressure during the overall holiday season so far, which is running 10% higher than a year ago.

The nature of the fraud threat did shift over the weekend — with criminal fraud claims taking share from first-party fraud claims. Criminal fraud claims gained 4% in their share of claims.

 More on Signifyd’s methodology and data

Signifyd’s Holiday Season Pulse Tracker data is derived from U.S. transactions on Signifyd’s Commerce Network of thousands of ecommerce retailers and brands. Commerce Network intelligence also powers Signifyd’s Commerce Protection Platform, which leverages AI-driven machine learning models and data from millions of transactions to detect and block fraudulent activity.

The platform also recognizes and approves legitimate customers, ensuring their orders are fulfilled rapidly. Through its network, Signifyd has seen more than 600 million unique digital wallets[1] globally, meaning that 98% of the time when a shopper comes to a Signifyd-protected site, Signifyd’s machine-learning models recognize the shopper instantly.

For a tutorial explaining the methods and meanings behind Signifyd’s Holiday Season Pulse Tracker data visit Signifyd’s YouTube channel.

[1] A digital wallet is a distinct combination of signals present in an online transaction.

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Digital Commerce 360 lists the industry’s top vendors in its annual “Leading Vendors to the Top 1000 Retailers” report, which also explores new ways in which online merchants are deploying ecommerce tools and technology to increase profits and better serve their customers. 

While the report’s rankings are important in pointing merchants to the best ecommerce vendors to help them succeed, it also explores merchants’ thinking through a detailed survey. This year’s survey illustrates how difficult it is to juggle all the competing requirements for digital commerce companies to be successful and how important it is for an ecommerce business to view entire customer journeys when making tech investments.

Consider the following findings in this year’s “2024 Leading Vendors to the Top 1000 Retailers” report:  

• Retailers will spend more on technology in 2024 — 63% said so.
• Equal numbers will pay to increase conversion and improve customer experience — 57% in both cases.
• 48% said technology spending for improved payments and payment security had effectively increased conversion in 2022.
• One in 10 placed improving payments and payment security among their top five 2024 priorities.

Where digital commerce companies are spending in 2024

You probably see where this is going. The surveyed retail leaders said they wanted to increase conversion and provide better customer experience. The vast majority said that’s where they’d be spending their money. A smaller number — only 10% — said improving payments and security, including fraud protection, was a priority.

That’s a disconnect. Here’s why: Investing in a future-focused payment stack is a key to increasing conversion and providing a better customer experience. An often-quoted study from 451 Research found that poor payment strategy  — limiting payment options and incorrectly declining legitimate orders — cost retailers $36 billion annually.

That’s a lot of cart abandonment and lost conversion. And the customer experience? The damage there goes without saying. OK, we’ll say it: When a legitimate customer is turned away for no good reason — and that experience accounts for $16 billion of 451 Research’s number — it’s a bad user experience. Bad enough that a sizable portion of those customers are finished with the retailer who turned them away.

Furthermore, 451 Research discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic that retailers who considered payments a “strategic area of focus” were in a better position to succeed than those who were not.

Optimizing payments is a key to better user experience

In fact, of the retailers who said payments was “a highly strategic area of focus, 55% said at the time that the COVID-19 outbreak was having a positive impact on their sales,” 451 Research reported in “Payments in the (New) Roaring Twenties.” Among those who described payments as somewhat or not at all strategic, only 25% said the pandemic was having a positive effect on sales, according to the report. 

 Signifyd Chief Customer Officer J. Bennett made a similar point in an interview included in DC 360’s “2024 Leading Vendors to the Top 1000 Retailers,” explaining that the job of risk intelligence teams goes well beyond stopping fraud. 

“Instead of stopping loss, they’re charged with maximizing conversions and minimizing bad approvals,” Bennett said in a Leading Vendors report Q&A. “When they do this successfully, customer satisfaction scores go up. The best risk management teams are now seen as a driver of business growth rather than a cost center that needs to be managed.” 

In short, risk intelligence teams at successful retailers are focused on maximizing conversions and contributing to a customer experience that brings customers back repeatedly and builds long-term customer value. 

DC360 listed Signifyd among the best ecommerce vendors for the third time

The 2024 report marks the third year in a row that Signifyd was listed as the No. 1 solution provider offering payment security and fraud prevention for the largest online retailers in the United States. The list is assembled based on the number of customers a solution provider has among Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 retailers, based on revenue. 

The continued success comes at a time when payments and risk are rapidly evolving. As ecommerce has grown as a portion of retail sales during and since the pandemic, fraud and policy abuse have grown with it. All of which has led to a new breed of risk intelligence professionals.  

“The retailers that are successfully managing these risks are working more cross-functionally within their organizations than ever before,” Bennett told Digital Commerce 360 for its report. “They’re working with marketing to understand the promotions they’re pushing and the customers they’re trying to attract; with the payments team to understand loss prevention and with operations to understand fulfillment.” 

Signifyd’s third consecutive appearance on Digital Commerce 360’s list comes amid a series of accolades, including being named to Fast Company’s 2023 Most Innovative Companies list for its work in artificial intelligence and among Deloitte’s 2023 Technology Fast 500 winners. 

Feature image by Signifyd

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Anti-fraud providers in particular are crucial to ensuring a healthy online checkout flow. A poorly calibrated anti-fraud service can stifle holiday sales and cause customer frustration to surge due to inaccurate declines, or it can open the floodgates to chargebacks by allowing fraudsters to obscure their behavior among the increased sales activity. Even worse, an insufficiently provisioned system might not be able to withstand the increased order volume, which could result in blocked orders across thousands of merchants.

How to prepare for Black Friday 

At Signifyd, we recognize the importance of Black Friday and the entire holiday season for merchants, as well as our own vital role in ensuring success for our customers. That’s why we’ve enacted numerous, painstaking measures to fortify our capacity and decision accuracy. We’d like to share some details about the preparations undertaken to ensure that our system excels during Black Friday and the holiday season. 

Our preparations are focused on two main axes:

• Accuracy: Maximizing approvals on good orders and rejecting as many fraudulent orders as possible
• Availability: Ensuring our system is able to provide anti-fraud evaluations in a timely and reliable manner, regardless of merchant order volume

Upholding our bar for excellence on either front is no trivial task. As far as decision accuracy is concerned, promotions like Black Friday pose an inherent challenge for machine learning anti-fraud solutions because customer behavior during these periods is so aberrant from the norm. The models that underpin our anti-fraud service assess order characteristics to determine their statistical similarity to either valid orders or those generating chargebacks. However, Black Friday shopping patterns introduce complexities as legitimate customer purchases deviate significantly from typical patterns, with orders appearing less conventional due to unusual timing and atypical discounts. Furthermore, many characteristics align more with fraudulent behavior, such as a high volume of orders placed in a short period by users with minimal or no order history with a merchant.

More than a decade of fraud protection experience gives Signifyd an edge 

Signifyd employs a variety of mechanisms to overcome these challenges. First, we have an inherent advantage as a long-standing anti-fraud provider who’s weathered more than a decade of Black Friday events. Our proprietary training datasets contain many years of promotional events whose output is incorporated into our machine learning models’ decisions. As a result, our models “understand” to a certain extent how to interpret Black Friday abnormalities due to prior years’ behavior. 

But furthermore, during the holiday period, our Risk Intelligence and Data Science teams are working double-time to forecast and simulate purchase behavior and tune our risk thresholds accordingly to ensure optimal performance. This involves assessing historical data as well as incorporating merchant-specific context into our decision mechanisms, which requires close coordination with our customer-adjacent Implementations and Customer Success teams. 

Finally, during Black Friday itself, our Customer Success teams closely monitor live merchant results and coordinate with Risk Intelligence and Data Science to make any fine-grained adjustments to model thresholds and rules if additional tuning is needed. Ultimately, between our product’s capabilities that support precision performance tuning in real-time and our preparatory risk calibration and model training, Signifyd enters the holiday rush with confidence in its ability to provide highly accurate decisions that delight customers and frustrate fraudsters.

Holiday shopping volumes call for pressure-tested operations

Yet providing accurate decisions is only half of the battle. We also need to ensure that we can provide hundreds of decisions per second, without compromising on accuracy or system availability. During Black Friday, the surge in online orders requires a robust system to prevent any degradation in our decision latency or availability during peak traffic periods. Fortunately, our Engineering team is at the forefront of tackling this challenge, implementing rigorous load testing and proactive measures to maintain our operational status even in the face of heightened demand.

One of the main challenges of the Black Friday shopping event is the immediacy of the increase in order volume. Many promotions start at midnight, and order volumes can balloon from zero to thousands of orders from one minute to another. Although Signifyd’s cloud-based infrastructure is highly scalable, no system can scale quickly enough to avoid any degradation of service with a purely reactive scaling approach. 

As such, Signifyd preemptively scales its infrastructure prior to the holiday period to ensure sufficient capacity for any merchant needs. Then, rigorous load tests are conducted, simulating the anticipated surge in user activity to identify and address any potential bottlenecks. These bottlenecks are identified and remediated, and the load test is repeated until we achieve a satisfactory level of performance. This year, we were content after testing our system at roughly 2.5 times the forecasted Black Friday peak load — ensuring a healthy margin of additional capacity in case of any unforeseen additional traffic. 

Code freeze ensures smooth operations during retailers’ most critical time 

Finally, in an effort to limit the variables that might alter our system’s behavior during this critical merchant period, Signifyd imposes a “code freeze” on a number of our production services in the weeks leading up to Black Friday. Our system is locked into place to minimize the risk of any anomalous behavior during this pivotal phase for our customers, although certain merchant-critical changes and adjustments with well-scoped, limited impacts (such as risk threshold adjustments) are permitted. That said, code freeze doesn’t mean that development and productivity comes to a halt for Signifyd’s developers; changes are constantly being made on upcoming features and improvements, but they are not deployed to our production environment until after the Black Friday surge has passed. 

With the holiday season upon us, Signifyd strives to provide merchants with peace of mind knowing that their order flow is supported and secured. Our years of experience and months of dedicated preparation ensure that we are a reliable ally in the complex ecommerce landscape. We look forward to supporting our customers during the most high-stakes online sales period of the year, and we are proud of the service that our teams come together to provide.

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From the bustling lanes of ecommerce and the evolution of brick-and-mortar stores to the nuances of strategic planning in a constantly evolving market, this episode explores the currents and undercurrents of modern retail. As industry giants reshape retail of the future, where does that leave smaller retailers? And what does it truly mean to be fearless in today’s commercial age? Join us as we dissect these questions and more, offering insights that are as profound as they are practical. The summary below is not a verbatim transcript.

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In the second episode of The Fearless Commerce Podcast, co-hosts Mike Cassidy and Adam Silverman sit down with Killough, who is based in Signifyd’s Belfast office. With a sharp focus on consumer insights, fraud trends and the current state of ecommerce, Killough provides a keen perspective on the predictions for this year’s online holiday shopping trends.

This episode offers a glimpse into the future of ecommerce and includes insights into customer loyalty and the influence of inflation on buying patterns. Join us as we explore the numbers, discuss the predictions and look at the factors driving the 2023 ecommerce holiday season. The summary below consists of paraphrased questions and is not a verbatim transcript.

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In our first episode, we delve into Signifyd’s State of Commerce 2023 report, an exploration of, well, the state of commerce and the state of the economy and the consumer, too. Our guest Signifyd Chief Customer Officer J. Bennett uses data and expert insights to paint a vivid picture of the retail landscape, while examining the concerns and aspirations of both retailers and consumers.

Bennett talks about consumers’ serious concerns regarding inflation. This worry isn’t just a passing thought; it’s reshaping how they interact with the world of commerce. They don’t want only products; they want significant value backed by exceptional customer experiences. The shift is a wake-up call for retailers. Merchants are now on their toes, striving not just for profitability but to strike the right balance between customer service and risk mitigation.

Bennett also provides a sneak peek into the coming months, especially the  upcoming holiday shopping season. The forecast? While growth might seem modest, hovering around the 4% to 5% mark year-over-year, there are subtleties in these numbers. The projected growth rates vary by vertical , and a lot depends on execution. However, Bennett saves room for optimism.. He sees the holiday period as a time of immense opportunity. The best in the retail business aren’t just waiting for customers; they’re reaching out, understanding the pulse and delivering exactly what customers want.

Bennett’s insights  point to a return to the energy of a pre-pandemic holiday shopping season – an exciting time for retailers who remember the hustle and bustle of that period. Are you ready to delve deep into the currents of modern commerce? Join us for some fearless conversation.

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Fraudsters and those looking to protect businesses from them are engaged in an escalating battle. On the one side, merchants, banks and fraud protection providers work to improve transaction fraud detection to catch fraud before or when it happens. For their part, fraudsters are employing a myriad of tactics to commit fraud against unsuspecting victims. Ensuring the safety of financial transactions through bank transaction fraud detection, which can include fraud transaction detection using machine learning, has become an essential part of online business.

Given the importance of fraud protection, we’ve written this guide to unravel the intricacies of the threat landscape, highlighting the latest in transaction monitoring and chargeback prevention to secure online purchasing activities. Dive in to understand how the world of fraud detection in online transactions is shaping the future of ecommerce and what it means for you.

What is transaction fraud from a merchant’s perspective?

Transaction fraud occurs when deceitful actors exploit vulnerabilities in the payment process. The end result is often a painful chargeback for businesses. And these aren’t confined to just stolen credit card details. Sophisticated fraudsters are adept at mimicking legitimate purchases, only for them to be disputed later. Each chargeback means more than lost revenue; it also potentially erodes the trust merchants have fostered with their customers.

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