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E-commerce is changing the way people shopped before. No crowd, no physical exertion, no passengers fighting each other for the left sale items; e-shopping is truly a heaven for introverts and people who rarely get time from their jobs. With covid-19, the trend of online shopping has increased and 67% of consumers have stated that because of covid-19, they shop in different ways now. To reflect these changes, e-commerce companies are finding ways in which they can verify addresses and provide a safe and efficient customer experience. By adding online address verification, not only the companies can benefit from proven customer information but the customers can also benefit through automated onboarding of information.
Covid-19 and increasing trends of online shopping
As Covid-19 introduced the peak of the e-commerce industry, we can safely state that the nature of customer consumption has changed and evolved to new trends. 20 to 30% of the business companies decided to shift towards online and 9 to 12% of grocery shopping turned towards e-market in the year 2020. This behavior change has happened because people are now restricted to their homes due to the coronavirus SOPs and work from home, according to the June 2021 Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey.
Concerns in e-commerce
- The checkout process should be as painless as possible for the customers. If there is any ambiguity, then the customer may leave the website without ordering anything. The addition of an arrangement where the system auto-fills the information at the checkout procedure will improve the user experience.
- Customers can add the wrong delivery address by mistake. If the given address isn’t correct then there is a possibility that that shopped item will not get delivered to the rightful owner or it may not get dispatched at all. If we include an address verification system in the checkout process that can verify the addresses in a real-time manner, then not only this problem can be controlled but we can also manage the fraud attempts on e-commerce, which takes us to the next topic of fraud attempts in e-commerce.
Frauds in E-commerce can happen!
Since online shopping is mostly anonymous, any person can steal the personal information of a person like his credit card information, social security card information, and identity information, etc, and can use that knowledge to purchase a product online.
- The fraudster can use a stolen credit card, purchase and ship the item to his address.
- The fraudster can use a stolen identity to buy restricted products.
This puts a great strain on e-commerce websites because when the authentic users ask for an inquiry, these websites have to provide chargebacks which not only cost them financial losses of both the product and the chargeback but also demolish their reputation.
In this case, if there’s a system that can verify not only the identity of the person but also the address of the customer in real-time, then the attempts related to the above scenario can be stopped. The good news is that we can implement such a system with address verification.
What is address verification?
The Address verification process verifies if the address given by the person is authentic. E-commerce industries implement this in their websites to authenticate the address of the customer ordering online and reduce error rates and fraud attempts. It is a measure taken to authenticate the users before taking them to the payment page.
Verifying addresses in E-commerce
With Verification of Address, e-commerce websites can authenticate the legitimizing of the customers and filter out the fraudsters. How does verifying an address of a user work? First, the users are asked to upload their pictures holding their identity documents. The system lives scans and matches the picture with the photo attached to the government-issued identity card. The address information on the uploaded documents will be verified with the addresses on reliable documents like id cards, passports, utility and tax bills, and driver’s license. The documents will work as Proof Of Addresses and verify that the customer is actually providing the correct addresses.
The simplified steps of this address verification process are given below,
- The system checks the authenticity of the documents, whether they are fake or real.
- When the document authentication is verified, the system extracts the information using OCR technology and checks if the information given on the document is correct. This is done by comparing the extracted address information with the address available on authentic documents.
- The system will send a report in case the address verification fails.
Ending statement
Having address verification installed in the system will validate addresses and reduce the error chances of adding wrong address information and fraudsters attaching different shipping addresses after buying through stolen credit cards and other identity information. The inclusion of auto-fill technology will be beneficial in providing a stable and satisfactory customer experience.