Do you decline orders because the billing and shipping address don’t match?

Billing Address vs Shipping Address

An order comes in, everything checks out except one detail, there is a billing and shipping mismatch. Quick, what do you do? Do you call the customer to verify the shipping address? Do you do a Google search on the customer and/or the address? Or like far too many businesses we here at Signifyd have spoken to, does your business simply cancel the order to prevent fraud out of fear and leave money on the table?

A billing and shipping address matching is sacrament to many online merchants, and approving an order to a customer with a mismatch is almost paramount to apostasy. For many of these merchants their eye is naturally drawn towards what is different, a piece of information that sticks out. Most online shoppers have a billing and shipping consistency, where their bill goes so goes the product. So when there is a billing and shipping mismatch, the inconsistency brings up a red flag for merchants. Inconsistencies such as a billing address being different from a shipping address cause a knee jerk reaction among many web merchants resulting in the above mentioned long drawn out manual review process or flat out cancellation.

So the process leaves money on the table, what is the alternative?

Currently, the alternative many merchants rely on are one off location services to verify the addresses of their customers, or some will go the extra step of calling the bank to verify the billing address of the card holder. Many merchants who don’t flat out cancel orders with a billing and shipping mismatch often call their customers to confirm their address as well. But in man hours, this is obviously a cost prohibitive option to say nothing of the annoyance the merchant is causing the customer. For businesses that don’t call to verify an address when there is a mismatch, many will subscribe to services such as Spokeo, Whitepages and other address verification websites to see who the resident is and where they live. But there is a drawback to this option, and that drawback is that these verification websites give you the raw data without providing any kind of contextual analysis to your specific order. Understanding if that data positively or negatively affects the decision to approve or decline an order can be more difficult than getting the data in the first place.

The delivery address may look shady, but this guy has an American Express Black Card

Signifyd Ecommerce Fraud Solution provides instant analysis on every order alongside a plethora of rich interactive data on every purchase, explaining in detail why a customer may have a shipping and billing address that don’t match. Utilizing our over 120 different data sources, we can tell you that the customer may be shipping to a friend which we can verify through social media. Signifyd can verify that perhaps the consumer is currently on vacation or living abroad in another country, or that they are buying for a relative that has a different last name. Signifyd provides this order analysis in real time instantly for every order, taking the guess work out of a different billing and shipping address for an order.

Final thoughts on different billing and shipping addresses

Cybersource, Kount, Retail Decisions and others have for years now dominated the fraud prevention market by utilizing the information from the merchants own checkout and then running that information through customized rules engines that the merchants themselves set up to determine if an order should be accepted or declined due to the shipping and billing address being different. No outside information was brought, no checkout information was enriched and the data analyzed was not presented in a way that connected shoppers to the real world. With Signifyd, even the most novice employee with zero understanding of fraud can correctly identify if a billing/shipping mismatch on an order is a fraudulent attack or a legitimate order. If you still have your doubts, give our system a spin for free.