TransUnion today released new findings around online retail trends during the start of the 2020 global holiday shopping season. The research shows a 1% decrease in the rate of suspected online retail fraud1 worldwide during the start of the 2020 holiday shopping season compared to the same period in 2019. The rate of suspected e-commerce fraud this holiday shopping season, though, is 59% higher from the same period in 2018 and 14% higher from all of 2020 thus far. The findings are based on the same-store sales analysis of TransUnion’s e-commerce customers during the traditional start of the global holiday shopping season, Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.
These findings mirror the recent conclusions in TransUnion’s 2020 Consumer Holiday Shopping Report that found 50% of U.S. consumers are concerned with being victimized by fraudsters this holiday season. The concern is relatively uniform across generations, though TransUnion found Gen X are the most worried about being victimized at 53%. Heading into the holiday shopping season, the TransUnion Financial Hardship Study conducted from October 28 to November 5, 2020 found 37% of 9,515 consumers surveyed globally said they had been targeted by digital fraud related to COVID-19, a 28% increase from the same survey the week of April 13, 2020.
“With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the move from offline to online transactions, detecting digital fraud attempts has become paramount for e-commerce providers,” said Shai Cohen, senior vice president of Global Fraud Solutions at TransUnion. “In order to avoid cart abandonment with all of these new sales opportunities, it is equally if not more important to ensure consumers are able to make friction-right digital transactions.”
In addition to the above findings, TransUnion observed the following shopping fraud trends from November 26 to November 30:
The percent of suspected fraudulent e-commerce transactions during the start of the holiday shopping season and entire year since 2018.
- 15.54% from Nov. 26 to Nov. 30, 2020. 13.67% so far in 2020
- 15.70% from Nov. 28 to Dec. 2, 2019. 9.80% all of 2019
- 9.76% from Nov. 22 to Nov. 26, 2018. 11.12% all of 2018
The days with the highest percent of suspected fraudulent e-commerce transactions during the start of the 2020 holiday shopping season.
- Cyber Monday, Nov. 30: 26.03%
- Saturday, Nov. 28: 12.39%
- Thanksgiving, Nov. 26: 12.29%
- Black Friday, Nov. 27: 12.02%
- Sunday, Nov. 29: 11.68%
The global countries/regions and U.S. cities where the highest percentage of suspected fraudulent e-commerce transactions originated from during the start of the 2020 holiday shopping season… Globe NewsWire