Digital Onboarding Proving Its Value

Remote onboarding — be it new customers or new products — is cresting like a giant post-pandemic wave, and businesses are scrambling to make sure it doesn’t swamp them. In a period marked by confusion, hackers see a playground of attack vectors in the onboarding process. And while they have many faces, identity scams are among their very favorites.

Jonathan Peacock, founder and CEO of eCommerce platform Zibbet, recently told PYMNTS that the process can be “… exhausting for smaller businesses and individuals. Sellers must onboard, add their inventories and verify that their products are listed under the correct categories — on each platform, no less. This is time-consuming for those that already have online stores open and orders to fill.”

In PYMNTS’ latest Digital Consumer Onboarding Tracker®, done in collaboration with Melissa, advances in identity verification and validation are assessed for seller ease and fraud-fighting potency. Consumers just aren’t happy with same old-same old performance anymore.

“Security has steadily become more important to customers, as 90 percent state it is essential when creating accounts. Nearly 70 percent abandoned eCommerce purchases due to problems with account details and passwords in 2019, indicating that consumers are becoming less content with the traditional security measures attached to online accounts,” the report states.

The Multi-Source Data Diet

Noting that overall eCommerce activity grew 23 percent in just one week in March due to the pandemic, the Digital Consumer Onboarding Tracker® notes that companies large and small had to respond as best they could, but onboarding with perhaps less confidence.

“eCommerce giant Amazon is also considering new ways to onboard merchants as the pandemic continues,” the new Tracker states. “The company is testing a video interviewing system to replace in-person meetings with sellers that want to list their products. It has been carefully exploring this technology for several months, trialing it with more than 1,000 merchants in countries like China and the United States to prevent spreading the virus and boost its fraud protection efforts. Amazon has seen an increase in fraudsters posting bogus COVID-19 cures since the pandemic’s start, but having merchants go through video interviews could help keep such products off its platform.”

Automating aspects of the onboarding process is one of best ways to streamline it, minimizing the abandonment problem that haunts online sales. Multi-source data helps with this.

“To ensure accurate delivery, address autocomplete can be added to forms and checkout to suggest valid, standardized billing and delivery addresses,” Melissa Chief Strategy Officer Bud Walker told PYMNTS. “With the variety of multisourced data available, you can easily check that a given person is associated with the physical address, [that] their phone number is live and callable and the email address on record is active and receives email — not to mention a host of mobile KYC [Know Your Customer] capabilities like document verification and liveness or biometrics checks that can be added for a higher degree of fraud detection and compliance. Consumers get more timely, accurate deliveries, and companies protect their customer data and bottom lines. Delivering on trust can be a win-win for eCommerce [companies].”

Seller Supreme

With Amazon sellers “… earning more than half the total sales made on Amazon in 2019,” as the report states, servicing third-party merchants is a strategic imperative for that platform, and many others.

“Marketplaces will need to find ways to help sellers get up and running as fast as possible to stay competitive. Simplifying onboarding and accompanying product uploading processes with automated tools — and using this data to target listings to the right potential buyers — may prove essential to helping individual sellers grow their sales.”