<b>Elements of E-Commerce 2.0 are already here and now</b>
Posted by Andre Edelbrock on Wed, Dec 10, 2008
Sarah Lacy raises some interesting points, however, I’d like to add one more. Retailers have been evolving their e-commerce sites in one critical area that is making it more friendly for good customers — and more difficult for the bad customers. And that area is fraud management, where behind the scenes (of all places), the 2.0 idea of social networking is being incorporated — in particular as part of the Global Fraud Fighting Community.
Retailers, airlines, gaming companies, banks, payment processors and fraud solution providers and many more, are collaborating by pooling their good and bad transaction experiences,and using that to do a better job of weeding out the bad guys and treating the good customers better. That may mean expedited service, no secondary checking, no requests for additional proof that you are who you say you area, faster order processing, and it most certainly means not telling good customers you don't want their business, so please shop somewhere else.
They (the retailers, airlines etc.) are now actually working together to solve the biggest problem of shopping online -- that no one knows who you are, and good customers and bad customers look the same to order processing software. By combining their knowledge, retailers can recognize "familiar" customers, even when they are shopping at your store for the first time. In effect, customers carry their positive track record with them, enabling online merchants to treat them accordingly.
We often forget that no matter how good a shopping site is, if the checkout experience is bad, that's the only thing a customer remembers. Making that process transparent, simple, convenient and fast is the flipside of a fraud detection service that employs social networking concepts to deliver a better overall result, as well as the lowest Total Cost of Fraud.