As new seasons see more people starting to buy more, retailers have every reason to be wary of shoppers, It’s not only consumers who have to be careful of the tricks of retailers, but online retailers are also having to be alerted to some of the common ways that shoppers are cheating them, using tactics that they wouldn’t get right with physical stores.
Cheating customers cost retailers
Fortunately, fraud management can help online retailers detect cheating customers and put a halt to fraudulent deeds and transactions. Retail fraud management is available from Accertify, a subsidiary of American Express. They know that it’s impossible to know who to trust online.
With limited resources, an online retailer may not have the means to root out problems and risks. As fraud and risk managers, they have fraud management tools that allow retailers to identify and prevent fraud and dishonest customer behavior.
They show businesses how to be proactive when it comes to managing risk and reducing online fraud and cheating. Their QuickStart guides provide all you need to get going and they are willing to share their fraud management knowledge with you.
Switching loyalties
Loyalty in the 21st century is nonexistent. Consumers aren’t loyal to any online retailer. They’re loyal to the best price and the best product. They don’t care about scoring points and endless cups of free coffee. They want good prices, good products, good customer services, and a hassle-free shopping experience.
They’re cheating on retailers by not only being loyal to them but joining up with many loyalty programs. They’re certainly not loyal to your brand alone. They look for loyalty programs that can offer them the best deal, whether it’s yours or someone else’s.
Customer loyalty comes from a customer being satisfied and having a positive experience, but these days a customer is getting that from many different brands.
Online retailers lose millions
When customers discover that products from their favorite retailer aren’t available, they don’t remain loyal and wait for the item to come in. They quickly look somewhere else.
This switching of loyalties costs retailers millions of dollars in sales. If an online retailer doesn’t have stock available and the customer looks elsewhere, chances are they won’t ever come back to your empty shelves. In spite of the popularity of buying online, many e-retailers are leaving the online realm as they can’t maintain a loyal customer base.
The Internet is a catch 22 situation as the retailer has to be there, but it’s where customers have the most opportunity to compare retailers and to do a retailer swap.
Theft of certain item-parts
Customers are still considered king, but for online retailers, they’d like to dethrone them. They’re cheats. They buy products online and return them at their will and fancy. But before they return them as defective, they remove one or two items.
Returns like this can contribute a significant amount to the profit margin. Every online return costs retailers time and money. An online retailer spends a lot of money trying to track the reasons and patterns for returns. Retailers often don’t check the quality of each returned shipment.
Abuse of the trial period
But it’s not only returning goods as defective. There are other tricks that dishonest customers use. Customers will often demand a refund, alleging that their order has gone missing. How many customers don’t also abuse the trial period, making use of the item for a while and then returning it as something that didn’t match their expectations?
There are many of these dishonest customers that have a host of wily ways to buy a product, use it, steal parts from it, return it and still get their money back.
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