eCommerce has given consumers a more convenient means of acquiring goods and services. While online shopping has been growing steadily over the years, usage of eCommerce platforms increased when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. According to ACI Worldwide Research, global retail eCommerce sales achieved a 209% revenue growth in April 2020.
Countries implemented lockdown and quarantine protocols to keep the virus infection rate down. As a result of these safety measures, consumers’ mobility was limited, and retail shops and brick-and-mortar stores were forced to close or reduce activities. Consequently, people have turned to online shopping platforms as a safer way to purchase goods, services, and even food and household supplies they need.
The unprecedented migration to the online world has brought new challenges to the retail industry. Online retailers and traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores need to scale their business operations to meet increased demand for remote purchases and customers’ preference for enhanced online fulfillment. They can leverage passwordless authentication to increase productivity in their operations and provide a more seamless user experience. Passwordless login solutions enable platform users to replace their passwords with stronger cryptographic login credentials to authenticate into their accounts quickly and conveniently.
Aside from scaling their operations, online retailers must also improve their cybersecurity measures. Account takeover, data breaches, and fraud, among other crimes, have increased to overwhelming figures during the quarantine periods. These security threats can cause customer distrust, reputation damage, and significant losses in revenues to retailers.
Therefore, to avoid such consequences, online retailers must review their cybersecurity protocols and implement trusted identity proofing measures in their retail platforms. Conventional identity verification methods are no longer enough to curtail criminals from infiltrating their systems as these processes are susceptible to theft and other forms of circumvention.
They can replace their legacy systems with modern identity verification solutions like mobile facial biometric verification and automated identity document authentication to bolster their defenses and ensure that they are only onboarding legitimate customers.
Mobile facial biometric identity verification uses commonly available mobile devices to perform the verification procedure quickly and securely. Platform users can easily take a selfie with their smartphones and have it compared to the photo displayed on their valid identity document, such as a driver’s license, they provided during onboarding.
Accordingly, apart from providing a selfie, users must also undergo an anti-spoofing test, which requires them to perform a gesture such as a blink, smile, or turn of the head, to determine if they are present in real-time. Advanced mobile biometric verification technology can recognize inconsistencies with facial modalities as well as irregularities with an image’s foreground and background.
To further eliminate eCommerce fraud risk, online retailers can layer their facial biometric identity proofing procedure with automated identity document verification, which determines if a customer’s government-issued ID is genuine or not. Digital identity document authentication technology harnesses artificial intelligence and machine learning to compare the customer’s ID to known specimen documents in trusted databases. Genuine government IDs have unique security features and other markings that cannot be easily replicated in fake ones.
By harnessing the power of modern identity proofing technologies, retail businesses can streamline their customer verification procedures and efficiently spot signs of fraud, ensuring that they are onboarding only genuine individuals in their systems. In addition, leveraging passwordless login solutions compliant with FIDO 2.0 standards also helps online merchants ensure security in their operations aside from allowing convenient authentication. Passwordless authentication relies on cryptographic credentials stored on a user’s device, which increases certainty that only that device can access a user’s account and a network.
To know more information on how online retailers can reduce eCommerce fraud with biometric identity verification and automated driver’s license verification, see this infographic from authID.
