How Can Home Improvement Retailers Improve Their Fraud Protection?
by Ethoca
The Home Improvement Industry is battling against fraud like never before. Why? Home goods, improvements and hardware are some of the fastest growing categories in ecommerce - and for good reason. Shoppers love the convenience, the expansive selections and competitive prices. Retailers now provide a sophisticated multichannel experience with various options for fulfilment (home delivery, pick-up-in-store, etc.) Business has been booming, but it’s not all good news.
Fraudsters are always lurking in the shadows, waiting for the ideal time and place to strike. Following the natural disasters that have recently affected millions of people in the Americas, fraud rates on products like generators rise significantly.
The problem comes when the volume of legitimate transactions increases: ultimately, ecommerce fraud will continue to rise along with it. The same qualities that attract customers to an ecommerce store also attract fraudsters.
Home improvement retailers run the risk of facing incredibly damaging losses. The high value of the equipment and household appliances means fraudulent orders can be significantly costly. Many merchants will choose to manage this increased risk by tightening fraud screening and order review processes – a move that could prove counterproductive to accepting more legitimate domestic and international orders, not to mention turn the customer away.
How do Ethoca Alerts help?
Ethoca’s global merchant-issuer collaboration network – the industry’s largest – closes the information gap between the card issuers and merchants and provides the retailer with cardholder confirmed fraud intelligence that arrives in hours or even minutes.
This gives the merchant a unique window of opportunity to stop expensive equipment and appliances from being dispatched to fraudsters. Everybody wins! (except the fraudsters). Goods can now be resold to genuine customers, while chargeback costs and negative customer experiences are eliminated.
One brick-and-mortar home improvement retailer was expanding its online platform and found that fraudulent activity was chipping away at its bottom line despite a solid defensive foundation. It needed a new tool in its fraud fighting shop that would help it reduce losses, increase sales, improve the customer experience and cut costs.
