Business gearing up for multiple sales events leading to Christmas need to focus on fraud prevention technology and real-time payment options.

Each year, major holiday sales have proven to be even more successful than the last, in terms of sales volume.

With retailers such as Amazon, Lazada, and Shopee promoting competing sales events around this year-end period, there is no stopping the online shopping boom in Asia.

Merchants often need to prepare well in advance for the massive surge in sales volumes, and also gear up to thwart opportunistic fraudsters.

According to Leslie Choo, Managing Director (Asia), ACI Worldwide: “Fraudsters take cover amid the unusually high volume of shoppers during the holiday shopping season. It’s highly plausible that a consumer may purchase groceries in the morning and a new TV in the afternoon, and this irregular purchasing pattern is a perfect opportunity for fraudsters to cash in on. For merchants, the challenge lies in differentiating between the two, and allowing genuine customer transactions to take place without friction.”

Gearing up for year-end sales season

According to Choo, it is essential to have multi-dimensional fraud strategies that make use of new technological developments like incremental machine learning, to understand how sales events will shift both genuine and fraudulent spending behavior.

By leveraging machine learning and positive profiling of consumer data, retailers can ensure high acceptance and low chargeback rate with zero friction, all while improving the consumer experience.

Also, the way people pay is changing. According to new research from ACI Worldwide and YouGov, real-time payment methods are preferred in South-east Asia in 2021, with Malaysia (45%), Indonesia (47%), and Thailand (53%) consumers using real-time payments more now than compared to before the pandemic started.

With the e-commerce industry growing by leaps and bounds, a robust and scalable e-commerce payments setup is essential. Merchants need to offer the payments experience and choice of payment method that their new and existing customers are demanding.

The payments experience can make or break a merchant’s success, in minimizing abandoned shopping carts.

This all brings into focus how important it is for merchants to retain flexibility with their payments setup, as well as the scalability to be ready for volume surges, and agility in accommodating shifts in the payments mix. And of course, being ready for changing customer behavior across channels.

While e-commerce sales can be exciting for both consumers and merchants alike, ensuring fraudsters have no part in it can help merchants keep it profitable too.