If the holiday season is crucial for any e-merchant, it is also the most difficult to manage in terms of customer experience.In this fall, merchants are already looking to the end of the year celebrations, wondering how to best benefit from the millions of new consumers who have adopted online commerce. According to the latest observations, the peak in Christmas shopping will be earlier than usual this year.

In other words, traders have a very short time frame to prepare to take full advantage of the recovery and forge business relationships that will last beyond New Year's Eve. Along with more creative marketing campaigns, promotions, and ideas, it is important that merchants bend over backwards to deliver a "frictionless" online experience with the goal of rewarding legitimate customers while blocking attempted fraud.

Faced with the resurgence of fraudulent activities linked to the pandemic - which penalize both brands and buyers - fraud prevention should be a top priority for traders. These will have to both meet very high demand and allow customers to enjoy a perfectly fluid digital experience. It remains to be seen how to reconcile these two objectives without losing sight of the prosperity of their trade.

Reduce the number of missed opportunities

The pandemic has prompted many individuals to shop online for the very first time. The step being taken, these new consumers constitute the target of choice of promotions imagined to retain them with new brands. However, these consumers remain novices, and when it comes to checkout, their brief history of online purchases leads some traditional fraud prevention solutions to identify them - often wrongly - as fraudsters. Missed opportunities also means that you should focus on all media platforms. You can cross-promote everything on popular platforms like TikTok and Twitch. Do you want to know how to get viewers on Twitch? Always stream according to plan and engage with the fans.

Indeed, studies show that new customers are five and seven times more likely than repeat customers to have their purchase rejected due to a lack of data. The consequences are also felt in the long term: up to 40% of refused customers will never visit the site of the merchant concerned. But even if the rejection is not total, the verification steps added by most fraud prevention solutions create an unacceptable level of friction that can ultimately compromise sales and cause the customer to abandon their cart along the way.

Outsmart fraud by monitoring and protecting customer data

Once the relationship is established with a client, it is essential to maintain it by establishing a high level of trust. Thus, a survey conducted in 2020 by PayPal reveals that the trust that a consumer places in a merchant is the main reason for their choice. Customers are increasingly aware of the risks of cyber attacks and rely on merchants to permanently protect their personal data (PII), including the information used to pay for their purchases.

Infected data can irrevocably damage a brand and destroy the trust that has been built, resulting in long-term loss of customers that will be very difficult to recover.  In the case of this form of online identity theft, the fraudster manages to gain illicit access to a third party's account in a given system. Our studies show that after accessing an account, the attacker acts quickly: 40% of fraudulent transactions take place within 24 hours of the account being compromised .