If you indulged in online shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend this year, you were far from alone. Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday drove a total of $11 billion in online sales, a 15 percent increase year-over-year (YoY) and 30 percent of all online sales in November ($39.5 billion), according to Adobe's Digital Index, which analyzed aggregated and anonymous data of more than 125 million visits to 4,500 retail websites to feed its predictive model.
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And, according to device intelligence and fraud prevention company Iovation, online retail transactions made from Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2015 were up 43 percent over 2014 and a whopping 143 percent over 2013. In addition, Iovation’s data showed that on Cyber Monday 2015 there were approximately 50 percent more online retail transactions than a typical recent Monday.
The devices those purchases were made on has also changed. iovation's data shows that retail transactions from mobile devices peaked on Saturday at 48 percent of all online transactions, marking a 17 percent increase over the rest of the year, when mobile typically accounts for 41 percent of all online retail transactions.
Now about the fraud…
Fraud costs retailers dearly. According to a LexisNexis study, mobile fraud cost retailers $3.34 per $1 of fraud in 2014, while online fraud in general cost retailers "only" $2.69 per $1 of fraud in 2014.
iovation found that 1.06 percent of all retail online transactions from Black Friday to Cyber Monday were fraudulent, compared to 1.25 percent during the rest of 2015. And .62 percent of mobile retail transactions over the 4-day holiday weekend were fraudulent, compared to .73 percent during the rest of 2015.
In addition, .15 percent of all online financial services industry transactions, which includes credit card applications, loans and banking transactions, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday were fraudulent, compared to .56 percent during the rest of 2015. And .17 percent of mobile financial services transactions conducted during the holiday weekend were fraudulent, compared to .12 percent during the rest of 2015.
You don't have to look far to see the good news in these numbers: "It’s not that surprising that fraud rates were slightly lower because the increase in good traffic from legitimate consumers taking advantage of holiday sales promotions far outweighed any increase from fraudsters," said Scott Olson, iovation’s VP of Product.
The top types of online fraud over the 4-day weekend, according to iovation's analysis, were credit card fraud, identity theft, and friendly chargebacks (when a customer uses a legitimate credit card to make a purchase, but then disputes the transaction, resulting in a chargeback to the site.)
iovation came to these conclusions by analyzing the tens of millions of transactions that its fraud prevention solutions processed from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. The company determines whether or not a transaction is trustworthy through a combination of advanced device identification, shared device reputation including 25 million client-contributed fraud reports, and real-time risk evaluation.
CSO OnlineThis story, "Black Friday to Cyber Monday: Mobile commerce up, fraud (mostly) down" was originally published by CSO.