E-commerce is definitely a consolidated market around the world. The numbers that point to this reality are impressive. In Brazil alone, revenues last year reached R$ 161 billion. The information is from Neotrust, a company that monitors digital commerce in the country. Also according to the survey, the growth was 26.9% compared to 2020. This led to 353 million deliveries in 2021.
This warming could well be just cause for celebration in the industry, were it not for one detail: in the digital universe, cases of fraud seem to far outweigh the positive wake of the economy. Across Latin America, fraudulent transactions on shopping sites were 97% higher than in North America. When compared with Asia and Pacific countries, the rates were 222% higher. The data is from Stripe, in the 2019-2022 cut.
The dangers in e-commerce are vast because there are so many industries involved. In addition to the customer, who has his data stored on the shopping site, the seller, the supplier and the bank or credit card operator are also involved in the business. Therefore, it is necessary to create a very broad security protocol, which protects the risks of attack in every possible way.
In general, the protection system most used in the site's onboarding stage has been authentication in more than one or even two factors, conditioning the payment to other means external to the site. For example, through the use of code confirmation via SMS or e-mail, which only reaches the owner of the data.
But there are other, even more daring ways to combat fraud in e-commerce. The use of facial biometrics also offers broad conditions to ensure that access to the buyer's account, where credit and debit card data may be stored, is done by the user himself. One of the advantages of resorting to technological solutions is that it dispenses with the application of new authenticators, concentrating all conferences in a single step.
And this, by the way, is an extra challenge for e-commerce sites willing to fight fraud. The technologies employed must provide broad protection to those involved in the operations, but at the same time must not impair the site's navigability or cause additional difficulties for the user to actually make the purchase. Therefore, the response time of security tools must be very accurate indeed.
It is also worth noting that the fraudster is not necessarily limited to the false buyer. The customer is also subject to encountering sites built to deceive people and obtain money and data improperly. The solution, in this case, involves the care that customers must have with the data and the suspicion in case of excessive data and links. It is important to find out about the source and have guarantees that the purchase will only be paid upon delivery of the product. Buying in the digital environment is an excellent deal for everyone, but (self)protection has to be highly rigorous.
The author Maria Cristina Diez is commercial and marketing director at Most Specialist Technologies - cristina@most.com.br most.com.br
