Consumer Behavior During Peak Shopping Seasons: Olympic Edition

People love to have gear that celebrates their enthusiasm: the colors of the hometown team, t-shirts of beloved artists, or items with the names of places they’ve visited. Big events like playoffs or a worldwide tour can create impromptu peak seasons for retailers in addition to the expected holiday bumps.

The Summer Olympics has sparked a flurry of purchases as consumers champion their favorite sports, their country’s team, and marquee athletes. To best handle this rise in purchases, businesses should refer to real data on what consumers want and how they shop to be prepared.

This blog will highlight insights from ClearSale’s just-published fifth annual State of Consumer Attitudes on Ecommerce, Fraud, & CX 2023-2024 to help online retailers succeed in peak seasons like the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris. 

While people appreciate the speed and convenience of ecommerce during peak seasons, consumers aren’t a monolith; ecommerce retailers are serving multiple generations with a wide range of preferences and expectations. 

Let’s review some of the significant data points in our latest report that pertain to the hurdles businesses face during peak seasons — like cart abandonment, false declines and customer worries about fraud — and how each cohort sees those factors. 

Reducing Cart Abandonment in Peak Shopping Periods

So close! Cart abandonment is endlessly frustrating for businesses, and the rate of cart abandonment has been ticking up, year over year. Statista reports that “In 2023, the share of online shopping carts that is being abandoned reached 70 percent for the first time since 2013.” 

For retailers, understanding what makes customers leave their carts full and shop elsewhere is the first step to preventing cart abandonment, especially in peak seasons.

During high-volume shopping periods, there is more urgency to shopping. Consumers are reacting to the energy of the event or holiday and want their items as soon as possible. Yet, if a transaction doesn’t meet their criteria, they can simply click over to another site — and they do. 

The three most important factors that online consumers consider when shopping are clear: price, shipping and selection. Globally, those factors rank as price (76%), free shipping (75%) and product selection (53%) in terms of their impact on consumers’ ecommerce shopping frequency. 

That varies by generation, with millennials and Gen Z ranking price and free shipping numbers one and two in importance. 

What can businesses do to help shoppers complete their transactions? Our report recommends four tips for reducing friction throughout the buying process. 

• Highlight sales and price reductions
• Make product choices obvious
• Simplify the checkout process
• Be transparent about costs

Addressing False Declines to Boost Sales

From a business’s perspective, a low chargeback and fraud rate is a win, but not if it comes at the expense of loyal customers. While declining suspicious transactions is smart business, too often, legitimate sales can get flagged and customers can take false declines personally. 

Giving questionable orders a closer look instead of wholesale declining them is one way to separate a suspicious transaction from a known customer ordering from a vacation IP or sending gifts to addresses other than their own. During peak seasons, it’s easy to rely on fraud filters and automatic declines. After all, when business is booming, you don’t want to slow things down.

Hitting legitimate shoppers with a false decline can have catastrophic effects on your bottom line —especially when you calculate the lifetime value of good customers. False declines have become such a significant issue, respondents in our study reported it to be a bigger problem than actual fraud.

• 18% of consumers experienced a false decline last year.
• 70% reported it to be the same or higher incidence than the year before.

Here are some strategies that help businesses minimize false declines without compromising protection against fraud:

• Identify the current false decline rate as a benchmark, and set realistic targets for reducing those declines. 
• Adjust fraud filter rules to flag common orders rather than automatically reject them. 
• Use some form of machine learning to analyze incoming orders to distinguish good orders from fraudulent ones. 
• Perform contextual analysis of suspicious orders to provide more data for the machine learning algorithm to improve its order assessments.
• Monitor your false decline rate using post-processing audits. 
• Monitor your social and customer service channels for customer complaints about declines, and quickly address those issues. 

Customer Attitudes on Fraud Prevention and Security

As ecommerce has become a go-to option for more shoppers, consumers have become more savvy and wary about fraud. Constant news reports about security breaches have only heightened awareness. Our original research showed that 16% of respondents experienced fraud in the previous year and more Gen Z consumers were victims of fraud, at 21%.

So, for today’s ecommerce customers, fraud is top of mind — and that doesn’t change during peak seasons. 

One standout finding from our research: 90% of consumers prioritize fraud protection over easy checkout. Additionally, 33% of consumers would rather have a safe ecommerce experience than get a lower price.

The stakes are high for businesses. In our research, a whopping 84% of consumers said that an online store that doesn’t protect them from fraud will lose their business. 

There are best practices that can enhance trust and reduce anxiety among high-volume shoppers:

• Add security badges, privacy policy links, and customer ratings to the footer of your website so customers can find reassurance on every page.
• Make sure to correct broken links, misspellings, incorrect or missing information, and technical glitches that can undermine the customer’s perception of your website as a reliable place to shop.
• Build consumer trust with easy navigation that makes it easier to stay, browse and buy —especially if they’re trying to work through a gift list quickly or take advantage of a sale.
• Add autofill functionality that lets customers skip the tedium of entering their address and payment data. This is especially welcome during high-volume shopping periods.
• Rather than reject a questionable high-value order, contact the customer directly. Our research found that 81% appreciate a purchase confirmation call from an online business.

What ClearSale Offers

Cross-training is a staple for Olympic-caliber athletes, giving them more flexibility and complementary strengths. 

The same is true in fraud prevention. That’s why ClearSale combines artificial intelligence models and an expert team of analysts to offer three levels of outsourced decision-making to protect a business from fraud. During peak seasons when sales are coming in fast, knowing fraud prevention is being handled by the pros can give businesses security.

Instant Decision ClearSale

This solution delivers real-time decisions fast using three layers of protection: AI model, fraud rules and our global database.

Automatic Decision ClearSale

This solution identifies fraud in under one minute using four layers of protection — enhanced AI models, fraud rules, our global fraud database and external sources — to ensure that decisions and notifications are delivered with higher accuracy.

Complete Decision ClearSale

This solution auto-approves valid orders, blocks fraud and flags suspicious orders for analysis using five layers of protection — enhanced AI models, fraud rules, our global fraud database, external sources and secondary review — to ensure the highest decision accuracy in the industry. 

Complete Decision ClearSale is also eligible for ClearSale’s Chargeback Guarantee.

Higher, Faster, Stronger

The Olympics spark worldwide interest and create their own peak season for ecommerce retailers. Use the insights and tips in this post, and the support of ClearSale solutions, to follow the Olympic motto: make sure your transaction approval rate is higher, transactions get approved faster and your fraud prevention strategies are stronger.

If you would like to know more about how we can help your online business prevent fraud during peak seasons like the Olympics and beyond, please reach out.