No online merchant will be surprised to hear chargebacks are rising. In the last year alone, more than three out of four customers in the United Kingdom and United States filed a chargeback — an all-time high. The global volume of chargebacks is expected to reach $165B in 2024. During the COVID pandemic, chargebacks became popular for their convenience and safety. Customers shopped online in their droves while physical stores were closed, but people were also less inclined to go through the returns process, which usually still involved an in-store visit or a trip to the post office. However ..read more

Here’s a story about Chris, an honest consumer buying his partner a gift on your ecommerce site. Chris fills his cart and clicks to complete the purchase.  Then, the unexpected happens. Chris’s card issuer refuses to authorize the transaction. Maybe Chris was shopping while on an overseas trip, the gift he chose was unusually pricy, or the issuer has low thresholds for merchants like you. Regardless, Chris gets annoyed because he’s been unjustly denied, and he blames you. So he abandons his cart and decides to shop elsewhere. You’ve lost the sale, lost a good customer, and likely paid th ..read more

To understand fraud, it helps to understand how fraudsters think. And some of the most revealing conversations about fraudulent activity take place on the dark web, a hidden portion of the internet known for black-market trading. There, fraudsters express their views and freely exchange information about all kinds of ecommerce fraud.  The dark web houses discussions about policy abuse, personal data theft, and more, and the insights team at Riskified continually monitors those discussions to provide intel for and about our merchants and partners. Here’s what the team discovered about the ..read more

Fraud managers and analysts know how much work it can take to win a chargeback dispute. In addition to curating evidence, analysts spend their time manually consolidating and organizing data, divvying up work, formatting and submitting evidence, and tracking status. And when you want to track overall program performance, there’s more manual work ahead of you. Make no mistake, analysts can contribute significantly to winning disputes, which makes tedious tasks a waste of their expertise and insight. If menial work takes up too much of the analyst’s time, win rates suffer because they are focus ..read more

As we reflect on the past year here at Riskified, it’s important to not only celebrate our accomplishments but also to acknowledge the challenges we encountered. For all of us connected to Riskified Cares, our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative, global uncertainty shaped our work in 2023. We particularly felt the reverberations of civil upheaval related to judicial reforms in Israel and, on October 7, the horrific start of the Israel-Hamas war.  The war’s impact on our operations and its emotional toll on our global team has been enormous, and it’s a testament to the Riskif ..read more

Across the ecommerce organization, from marketers to webmasters, the post-holiday period brings high-fives and sweet relief. Everyone gets to recover a bit after the insanity of the Q4 shopping season.  Everyone except for fraud managers, that is. In the fraud prevention world, insanity season is just beginning. There’s a deluge of returns and the potential of returns abuse that follows gift-giving season — and there’s a mind-boggling volume of chargebacks to review, dispute, and track.  These factors combine to create the notorious “holiday hangover” familiar to fraud teams in the ..read more

This content was paid for and produced by Riskified in partnership with the Commercial Department of the Financial Times. Minimizing risk exposure is a core responsibility for CFOs in any organization. In ecommerce, the danger of a major fraud attack is always lurking, creating not only a constant threat of catastrophic losses, but also an ongoing forecasting nightmare – a concern especially acute for public companies. Chargebacks, in particular, are a forecasting wildcard. With legacy anti-fraud strategies, chargebacks represent a huge unknown: will a company lose nothing next quarter to cha ..read more

Ecommerce policy abuse presents a $100 billion catch-22 for merchants. In a survey of 300+ merchants globally, the vast majority of respondents reported they can’t compete without offering generous policies and promotions — yet those same generous policies invite costly abuse.  The key challenge in handling policy abuse is identifying the “who” behind the order or claim: Are they a scammer, a repeat offender, or a regular customer with iffy return habits? Without clear identification, businesses risk being too cautious, unfairly rejecting valid claims or charging for returns, which hurts ..read more

The holiday rush can drive a significant portion of a merchant's annual sales. But it also opens the door to a surge in costly policy abuse. With the generous promos and returns merchants offer, customers and fraudsters alike find ways to take advantage. This abuse not only impacts merchant revenue, it also forces them to restrict the policies meant to reward good customers. A recent WBR Insights study, Policy Abuse and Its Impact on Merchants: Global Benchmarks 2023, sheds light on how merchants can leverage data analysis, automation, and collaboration to counter this abuse during the holida ..read more

What’s the biggest barrier to fighting returns abuse? Is it too-lenient policies? Last-mile delivery issues? Slow claims reviews? In Policy Abuse and Its Impact on Merchants, a new survey of more than 300 global ecommerce merchants by World Business Research (WBR), respondents pointed to a number of challenges:  Most (62%) still rely on manual reviews of returns claims and struggle to identify fraud quickly and efficiently.  Only 19% of respondents say other departments in their organizations understand the challenges of policy abuse very well.  One of the biggest problems is ..read more