Rick Sunzeri
Get ready to sprint through the Ecommerce Sales Olympics with tips on avoiding fraud and maximizing revenue. Stay ahead of the game with expert strategies and insights.
Celebrating the Season for Sports — and Ecommerce
The Olympics usher in a time where millions of people around the world celebrate the athletic achievements of others and get motivated to get more active, too. This is a golden opportunity to compete for the high volume of online shoppers, while striking a medal-winning balance of avoiding fraudulent purchases — without dropping the baton by accidentally turning away an authentic sale.
This is the first in-person Summer Olympics since the pandemic disrupted the games that millions of sports fans worldwide look forward to watching. The games — and increasingly, the world — are moving online: The Paris Olympics are expected to be streamed 4x more than Tokyo’s.
To protect your ecommerce businesses, you need to make a fast break to outperform fraud attempts.
Get Ready for the Ecommerce Sales Sprint!
For any ecommerce business selling absolutely anything related to the Olympics, the possibility for revenue is huge: Think Christmas, Black Friday and your biggest sale combined, then turn it up to 11 — it’s going to be wild!
The pressure is on, especially for time-sensitive sales promotions … the name of the game in Olympic campaigns. Your business has to be ready for all the sales: Like the Olympics, you’re going to get a swath of new players coming to your site to play from all around the world, but they might not always be playing fair.
Be wary of new customers looking like fraudsters
In our new research, State of Consumer Attitudes on Ecommerce, Fraud & CX 2023-2024, we found that customers spent nearly four times more online than they did in stores. But as more shoppers buy online, now is the time to make sure their digital experiences with your ecommerce business leave them as fans, not foes. The number of new online consumers will be through the roof, and they tend to be a bit clumsy in the beginning.
Newer online consumers are fickle and move things in and out of their online cart, or they’re unfamiliar with ecommerce shopping carts and buy each item individually. And they will likely do a lot of their online shopping at once. All of these “rookie” habits are also major fraud indicators.
New customers also may have trouble typing in their personal and payment information. Odds are, they’ll have a go at that more than once, making your fraud analysts want to false start and block the transactions out of anxiety.
To get ahead of the race, make sure to amp up the customer experience with easy queues for popular items and provide as little friction as you can manage to offer without knowing much about these newbies. The simpler and easier the experience, the less these newbies will wander off-track.
Your ecommerce fraud team is going to have their work cut out for them. And there’s even more to consider — most of the orders you’re processing fall into high-risk categories.
High-Risk Industry? Try High Anxiety!
Unlike in previous Olympics, when ecommerce still hadn’t become commonplace throughout the world, most (if not all) tickets for the Olympics presell online and sell out in minutes. French natives, in particular, have been desperate to find tickets online. Olympic swag sites, jerseys, shoes, and other sports apparel and sporting goods are already generating extremely high sales volume as well.
And don’t forget about online food delivery, which will spike during this time. Restaurants and cafeterias need to adapt to match times, high volume orders, and a demand for above-and-beyond customer experiences.
These are just a few of the top ecommerce markets that have become prime fraud targets for criminals. For online businesses in these high-risk industries, the stakes are much higher because they tend to experience more chargebacks and more fraud, which can lead to an overreactive fraud team that declines too many orders and leads to high false declines.
Here’s what else may be in hot demand from fans of the Olympics.
Consumer Electronics
It only happens if there are pictures and/or video, right?
That means consumers need cameras and smartphones to record and post on social media. They need state-of-the-art video display and sound systems for their watch parties. And any type of sporting event inspires more gaming and gaming device purchases. It’s no wonder that consumer electronics ecommerce revenue is expected to be worth over $930 billion by 2025.
Televisions
We had to give TVs their own category. When it comes to the Olympics, you watch either live or on a big screen! And size does matter in this market.
Since the beginning of 2020, consumers have consistently increased their TV size by an average of three inches — three times the previous average. But now, the trend is headed toward smarter TVs, with 79% of Americans owning one in 2024, up 13% since 2020. It’s clear that consumers want to access whatever content — or products — they like, with the click of a button.
Apparel, fashion and luxury goods
Traditionally, this industry was almost exclusively brick-and-mortar-based, but younger consumers are pushing these brands to move online — and they’re bringing their disposable income to the table. In fact, millennials and Gen Z are expected to account for 70% of global luxury goods purchases by 2025.
And guess what else those two demographic groups love? Yep, it’s sports and the Olympics.
Fifty-four percent of 18- to 29-year-olds tuned in to the Tokyo Olympics. This year, the Paris Olympics is introducing breakdancing as an official sport, trying to appeal to younger viewers even more.
So, what types of fraud should you expect during the Olympics?
Know Your Opponents — What to Expect from Fraudsters
We know that Olympics supporters and fans, alike, are scouring the web for tickets and apparel, so there are certain types of fraud attempts ecommerce retailers should be ready to defend against.
A fake ticket offer for the Paris Olympics cheated a UK swimmer’s family out of £2,500. Along with this scam, there are fake corporate giveaways, merch stores and special phone plans — along with the usual fraudster schemes. Here are some of the recurring opponents:
Account takeover (ATO) fraud
ATO fraud happens when a fraudster uses stolen personally identifiable information (PII) to take over user accounts and commit fraud. Often, they change account information so it is no longer accessible by the victim.
How big of a problem is ATO fraud?
In 2023, $635B in revenue was lost to ATO fraud. There’s no question that ecommerce businesses will have to contend with ATO fraud attempts during the Olympics.
Because so many Olympics fans are millennials and Gen Z, you can be sure that a good majority of online purchases are being made with smartphones. That opens up another world of fraud types.
Mobile commerce fraud types
Fraudsters are always looking for the advantage and have a full roster of creative tactics in their arsenal, including several types of mobile application fraud:
- Click injection happens when a fraudster injects a trojan virus in one mobile application and it activates in another, giving them access to customer information.
- In-app purchase fraud is a bit like ATO fraud, where a fraudster uses stolen credit card information to create an account, load the account with in-app currency and digital goods, and then sell the account online.
- Mobile payment app fraud happens when a fraudster pretends to be a legitimate company selling special sweepstakes chances through non-traceable accounts.
Of course, there are unintended fouls in every game. So, you also need a strategy for friendly fraud.
Friendly fraud
When customers forget about a purchase, don’t recognize a charge or experience buyer’s remorse (in good faith and bad), their first reaction is often to dispute the transaction and initiate the chargeback process.
The good news: It’s not too late to call in a coach to help put a fraud strategy together. That’s what we do.
Every Great Ecommerce Team Needs an Experienced Coach
No matter the size of your business, the Olympics season calls for a fraud prevention game plan to protect your company. That should include a full roster, including a sophisticated combination of automated fraud protection and secondary review, where cutting-edge fraud technology can flag suspicious orders and fraud analysts can then determine whether additional assessment is needed.
This isn’t a time to put your rookies on the bench.
ClearSale has a deep bench of players
At ClearSale, we help companies fight fraud using a proven hybrid approach:
- Cutting-edge algorithms for automated approvals performed by AI-enabled systems that “learn” as more transactions are processed.
- Sophisticated flagging process for suspicious orders that includes a customer-centric follow-up protocol.
- Full roster of more than 1,500+ fraud analysts with global fraud analysis and detection expertise who perform secondary reviews of potentially fraudulent transactions.
We understand individual markets better to help you to decrease false positives, approve more orders, and make more sales. If you would like to know more about how we can help your online business prevent fraud during the Olympics and beyond, please reach out.
