Good news for online retailers came this weekend as reports showed that this year’s online sales during Black Friday were up 11% from last year, with U.S. shoppers ringing up $595 million worth of orders throughout the day. The bulk of the increases, not surprisingly, went to the largest stores. As the blog on the Wall Street Journal reports:

The retail sites for Amazon.com, Apple, Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart each saw more than 4 million unique visits Friday, comScore said, with Amazon receiving the most traffic (up 28% from 2008). Apple, Best Buy and Wal-Mart sites also experienced double-digit traffic gains. According to Experian Hitwise, another Web monitoring firm, other e-commerce standouts included Sears, Staples and Dell.

These results are welcome news for retailers who have been concerned that fear of identity theft could have a noticeably negative impact on sales. Just last week SC Magazine predicted overall online spending to be down this year because of such fears. Luckily, so far, this does not appear to be the case.

With online commerce looking healthy, online retailers can now turn their focus from enticing online shoppers to ensuring that the orders that are coming in are valid. With the increase in shopping will inevitably come an increase in fraud. Unfortunately, as the volume of orders increases, it often involves increased time spent on manual reviews to distinguish the fraudulent orders from the legitimate ones.

Periods of high volume online shopping, such as now, underline the need for effective tools that can identify fraud more quickly with less manual intervention. Running checks on the device history, in addition to credit, identity, and shipping information, are all important steps in finding (and stopping) online criminals and repeat offenders.

We at iovation wish all online retailers a profitable and fraud-free online shopping season!

Tags: black friday, device checks, device history, eCommerce Fraud, ecommerce sales, identity theft, retail fraud

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 10:16 am and is filed under Holiday Fraud, Online Retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.