Retail Enabler: CardinalCommerce Protects SMBs From Holiday Fraud

‘Tis the season … to be very, very wary of phishing and other types of fraud.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales continue to increase year over year — while some project online holiday sales at $98 billion, new estimates from the National Retail Foundation project that this year’s online holiday sales could reach $117 billion.

Regardless of the exact values (we’ll just have to wait and see), one thing is certain: As more and more buyers flock online, the risk of cybercrime increases as well.

Research suggests that financial phishing scams jump up nearly 10 percent in frequency during the holiday shopping season. For example, about 34 percent of phishing scams were focused on procuring financial data in Q3 2015, but in Q4 (which covers the holiday shopping season), financial phishing accounted for more than 43 percent of scams.

That’s where CardinalCommerce comes in. The eCommerce fraud protection company, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, announced last Friday (Nov. 11) that it will be making its eCommerce authentication (CCA) platform available to thousands of small, emerging businesses; independent retailers; and entrepreneurs looking to get a piece of that $117 billion holiday pie.

The CCA platform will enable SMBs to capitalize on the same form of fraud prevention utilized by some of the world’s largest online retailers. Urban Outfitters, Keurig, Lego, PriceLine.com, for example, all use CardinalCommerce’s platforms.

The platform is now available for small- and mid-sized retailers to add to their online shopping carts. Merchants can add the lines of code to their existing shopping cart platform and run the authentication software on their back end. CardinalCommerce’s platform supports virtually all merchant platforms, wallets, legacy processing systems and authentication methodologies.

In a press release, Mike Keresan, CEO of CardinalCommerce, said, “We want to deliver our first-in-class Cardinal Consumer Authentication technology to all retailers across the country, from sole proprietors to mid-size companies, through turn-key shopping cart plugins. Now every merchant regardless of size can access the very latest in authentication technology to protect themselves, ensure an excellent customer experience and grow their businesses this holiday and beyond.”

The CCA platform allows merchants to customize which transactions can be authenticated, and retailers who use the platform are promised access to future developments in their payments ecosystem. It also shifts liability in the case of chargebacks.

Further, the authentication platform comes with the additional benefit that it can reduce the risk of false-positives — which is when a legitimate transaction is flagged as suspicious and subsequently declined.

Research suggests about 15 percent of cardholders have experienced wrongful decline sometime in their online shopping history. False-positives run the risk of alienating consumers and in some cases can lead to consumers outright abandoning a retailer. They can account for almost 3 percent of all revenue lost.

By 2018 it is projected that 20 percent of the world’s population will be shopping online. Every eCommerce interaction will generate transaction data that can potentially be exploited by fraudsters.

The more security checks and authentication procedures that are available for retailers of all sizes, the safer customers’ financial data will be. With its most recent move, CardinalCommerce has enabled retailers and their customers to proceed a bit more safely through the payments space during the high-risk, high-traffic holiday shopping season.