The e-Commerce market is Vulnerable to Fraud and Merchants Are Unprepared to Prevent it

As online shopping is one of the commonly used online activities internationally, the global retail e-Commerce sales globally are expected to increase to about $6.55 by 2022. However, the industry is still vulnerable to fraudsters, so a great share of profits is expected to be lost due to the vulnerability.

As per the new study by Juniper Research, the value of losses caused by e-commerce fraud is expected to skyrocket to more than $20 bln by 2021, indicating an increase of about 13% in a single year. Fraudsters have taken advantage of new customers and merchants using e-commerce services. They have fallen victims because they are not familiar with and prepared to prevent fraud that continues to flood the market.

Merchants and customers have to do a lot of work to enforce fraud prevention tools including using decentralized technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) to enable behavioral biometrics to reinforce security in all e-commerce platforms.

How to deal with fraudsters and decrease losses

Merchants should launch more technological friction into the checkout process to reduce fraud proportions from their current heights. Clear messaging about security checks as well as auto behavioral analytics advocate for disruptive tools including distributed ledger technology (DLT) and AI if they want to preserve the user experience. But if they don’t implement these cybersecurity strategies, they will continue registering heavy losses.

Some of the main security instruments that are being used by fraudsters in e-commerce channels include distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, bad bots, customer journey hijacking, e-skimming, online payment fraud, misconfigurations of web applications and many others.

However, merchants and customers are making every effort to prevent fraud on their e-commerce stores. They mostly use the following means: 

• conducting regular security audits; 

• requiring card verification value (CVV) numbers for every purchased commodity;

• ensuring that the store is payment card industry (PCI) compliant;

• regularly monitoring their e-commerce sites for any suspicious activity; 

• making sure they use an address verification service (AVS); 

• deploying hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) when sending data;

• make sure they collect and store less customer info to prevent hack or data breach; 

• setting limits on purchases to minimize fraud exposure; 

• using an anti-fraud solution; 

• checking properly to see whether the IP address and credit card address match; 

• dodging non-physical shipping addresses.

To guarantee that an e-commerce platform is strongly protected against cyber-criminals, a merchant or owner of the site should apply and execute cybersecurity into every phase of the website development. To do that, many of them employ decentralized solutions based on blockchain technology, or the means of artificial intelligence.

But combating fraudsters will probably take time as the e-commerce industry is still nascent. Its growth has been very rapid recently. So it is only natural that merchants need some time to keep pace with the growth and fix the existing vulnerabilities.