As any online merchant knows, the past few years have seen a rapid increase in digital transactions but unfortunately, fraudsters have adapted quickly and taken advantage of this. With booming online sales, retailers strive to provide a seamless shopping experience while simultaneously recognizing legitimate customers and keeping an eye out for fraud. It’s a balancing act that becomes more perilous as transaction volumes grow.
Perhaps one of the most frustrating challenges for online merchants is false declines. In fact, Aite-Novarica Group’s The E-Commerce Fraud Enigma: The Quest to Maximize Revenue While Minimizing Fraud Report found the average false decline rate is 1.16%. With over $960 billion in U.S. online sales in 2021, lost sales resulting from false declines is substantial, totaling more than $11 billion.
False declines occur when a good customer is suspected of fraud and then prevented from completing a purchase. This happens when a company’s fraud prevention solution provides inadequate insight into the identity of the customer, flagging them as a potential bad actor. The result is a missed sale for the business and a frustrating transaction and experience for the customer.
Merchants use a variety of tools to prevent fraud while ensuring they minimize friction during the purchase experience, but many legacy fraud solutions fail to provide the confidence needed to sufficiently assess the risk of the identity presented by the customer.
As identities become more complex, Experian recognizes that identity is personal. We are committed to creating new and innovative solutions to manage this complexity, and to addressing the constantly evolving opportunities for fraud that come along with it. Our newest offering, Experian Link, is the most recent example. It allows merchants to augment their real-time payment risk decisions with a perspective that links customer identity to the credit card being presented for payment.
Aite-Novarica’s report showed that nearly half of the e-commerce merchants surveyed are tolerating fraud rates between 20 and 49 basis points. Experian Link can improve that as it provides a positive match rate of 85% for major credit card brands, and when an identity is verified against a credit card, fraud rates can drop to as low as 10 basis points with no added customer friction.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, online merchants need the right tools to help them meet consumer expectations and support their growth now and in the future. Leveraging a strong identity verification solution like Experian Link in the authorization process will be critical for merchants, providing additional data that paints a more complete picture of their customer and leads to fewer false declines.
For more information on how Experian Link helps businesses enhance their identity verification solutions, please visit https://www.experian.com/business/products/experian-link.