Black Friday 2024: Retailers demand scalable, fast and seamless solutions.
Black Friday 2024: Retailers demand scalable, fast and seamless solutions.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the ‘hero’ days of the global retail calendar.
What started as a post-Thanksgiving American tradition has exploded into a worldwide retail phenomenon, driving billions in online sales. Adobe Analytics reported that Cyber Monday alone saw $11.3 billion spent in the US in 2023, with Black Friday closely following. The UK saw an estimated £9.4 billion spent during the same period.
However, behind the sales headlines, retailers face a critical challenge: ensuring their platforms can handle the enormous traffic surges while providing secure, seamless transactions.
The importance of identity verification, fraud prevention, and most importantly, platform scalability absolutely cannot be overstated in such high-pressure environments.
Understanding the key issues that arise during these peak Black Friday shopping events and offering solutions that help retailers stay ahead of the curve should be on every identity vendor’s to-do list.
Scalability Under Pressure
As retailers gear up for Black Friday, ensuring that their platforms are scalable is non-negotiable.
Traffic spikes are inevitable. Salesforce data shows a 12% increase in global online sales traffic during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with mobile commerce driving the majority of transactions.
Sites that cannot handle the surge face immediate consequences; Amazon, for example, famously lost millions due to a brief Prime Day outage in 2018, and smaller retailers are even more vulnerable on Black Friday.
Site speed and platform resilience are critical, especially given that nearly 40% of shoppers will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load.
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, cart abandonment rates soar, with an average of 69% of all shopping carts abandoned, according to the Baymard Institute.
The reasons range from slow load times to cumbersome checkout processes. Every second of delay costs retailers money, and slow identity verification systems only exacerbate the problem.
Fast, scalable mobile identity services help retailers streamline these processes.
Solutions for retailers need to offer real-time, secure identity verification that keeps customers moving swiftly through the checkout process without the bottlenecks that lead to lost sales.
Reducing Abandonment Through Seamless Verification
One of the primary contributors to cart abandonment is friction at the point of sale. Complex or delayed identity verification processes lead to frustration and lost Black Friday sales.
Statista’s research shows that 18% of abandoned carts are due to complicated checkout experiences, where slow or intrusive verification processes often play a part.
For retailers, the challenge is balancing security with a frictionless customer experience. Passive verification systems offer a solution by authenticating users in the background, reducing the need for time-consuming, manual verification steps such as waiting for SMS codes or email confirmations.
This frictionless process allows genuine customers to sail through checkout without unnecessary interruptions, ensuring fewer abandoned carts, a smoother overall experience, and, hopefully, a returning customer.
The Surge in Fraud: Retail’s Biggest Threat
With the increase in online activity comes a sharp rise in fraud attempts. According to Forter, fraud attempts during Black Friday and Cyber Monday spike by over 100%.
Fraudsters are well aware that in the rush to handle massive transaction volumes on Black Friday, some retailers may lower their guard. Account takeovers, identity theft, and synthetic identity fraud are some of the most common threats during these peak shopping periods.
One of the biggest vulnerabilities lies in traditional authentication systems, which often rely on weak or stolen passwords or temporary numbers. Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report found that over 80% of data breaches are linked to compromised credentials.
As fraudsters become more sophisticated, retailers need to move beyond basic two-factor authentication and adopt more robust, real-time identity verification systems.
Mobile identity is ideal to combat these Black Friday issues, offering mobile number-based authentication that eliminates the weaknesses of password-based systems.
By verifying a customer’s identity via their mobile operator, retailers can protect against account takeovers and other forms of credential theft.
Real-Time SIM Swap Protection: A Critical Defence
One particularly insidious form of fraud is the SIM swap attack, where criminals trick mobile carriers into transferring a victim’s number to a new SIM card.
Once they control the number, they can bypass traditional SMS-based two-factor authentication to access accounts and make fraudulent transactions.
Given the volume of transactions during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the potential for damage is high.
A real-time SIM swap detection service is essential for preventing these attacks: a solution that instantly detects when a SIM swap has occurred, allowing retailers to block unauthorised transactions before they can be completed.
Some SIM Swap protection providers use a list that can be up to four days old. Pretty useless when you consider that, to be successful, the SIM Swap fraudster must do their work – often in minutes – before the real owner realises they have no signal.
Retailers Need Agile, Scalable Solutions
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday grow larger every year, retailers, identity vendors, and technology providers must be agile enough to scale at pace.
Shopping events are no longer just about offering discounts—they now rely on providing secure, seamless, and fast user experiences.
It’s not just about having enough stock on your shelves on Black Friday; the ability to quickly authenticate identities, prevent fraud, and scale platforms without delays will determine the success or failure of retailers during these high-stakes periods.
A highly scalable identity verification platform is essential; to achieve this, the platform should be cloud-native, allowing it to expand its capacity in real time to meet demand without any manual intervention.
It should be built with a decentralised architecture that can distribute the load across multiple regions and networks, ensuring that it can handle thousands or even millions of transactions simultaneously.
The three ’S’s: Scalable, Seamless and Secure.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday present enormous opportunities for retailers, but they also pose significant risks.
Platform scalability, seamless identity verification, and real-time fraud protection are now essential components of success.
Delays result in lost Black Friday sales, and gaps in security lead to fraud. Retailers who lean on advanced, mobile-first identity solutions will be best positioned to capitalise on the opportunities of these high-traffic events while safeguarding their platforms and customer data.
Sekura.id and its partner network allow retailers to connect via one simple API to the SAFr (Sekura API Framework) platform to provide instantly scalable, robust and seamless authentication, verification and fraud prevention solutions that say, ‘Bring it on’ to the huge spikes in traffic that Black Friday brings, all while giving their customers an awesome CX.
