The checklist is long for any retailer looking to move into international markets — unfamiliar consumer behavior, new shipping challenges, taxes, duties, regulations, language localization, currency, payments etc. And then there is fraud — what it looks like in different countries and how best to protect an ecommerce operation from it.
FitForCommerce Senior Consultant John Bancroft has been working with retailers for 20 years, most recently helping them successfully move into new, foreign markets. In the second part of our video interview with him, Bancroft talks about the peculiar characteristics of fraud that retailers confront as they explore international growth.
As Bancroft said, the good news is that there are a host of technology providers and consultancies that can offer tools, advice and strategy for retailers looking to expand internationally — and Bancroft meant in all areas, not just fraud. But fraud is a particularly interesting challenge, as Bancroft alluded to. Fraud looks different, country-by-country.
Fraud and the tools to fight it vary by country
As this interview with Xavier Sheikrojan, who is now a Signifyd senior risk analyst, points out, it’s not only the type of fraud that merchants confront, but the amount and types of data that are available in different countries. Europe alone presents a patchwork of privacy laws that govern what customer data is available and how it can be used.
When it comes to available information to vet online orders, some countries, like Germany, protects certain identifying information on online maps, for instance, while other countries are not as restrictive.
What’s more, residents’ digital footprints might be slight in certain countries, making it harder to determine whether an order is legitimate or fraudulent.
All these factors, of course, are exacerbated by the fact that when a merchant moves into a new country, it is dealing with a market of consumers for which it has no buying history.
Guaranteed fraud protection can ease the uncertainty of global expansion
That’s where technology partners come in. Merchants can protect themselves from fraud while expanding globally by aligning themselves with a relatively new breed of enterprise fraud management called guaranteed fraud protection.
The model, which Signifyd pioneered, uses big data, machine learning and domain expertise to shift fraud liability from merchants to the fraud-protection provider, which makes the merchant financially whole for an approved order that later turns out to be fraudulent.
Given that the best form of guaranteed fraud protection relies on global transaction data from thousands of merchants, the fraud protection for merchants will likely have seen customers before they’ve ever visited a merchant’s site. That gives retailers with international ambition insights into orders coming from first-time customers in a new geography.
And it allows the retailer to cross one more thing off its going-international to-do list.
Photo by iStock
Contact Mike Cassidy at [email protected]; follow him on Twitter at @mikecassidy.
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