Buy. Return. Repeat. How AuthBridge helped an e-commerce giant break this pattern with a real-time customer verification process

With the ease that it promises, online shopping in today’s time is a customer’s haven. But it can quickly become a seller’s nightmare when fake or fraudulent buyers misuse the platform causing huge revenue losses.

When our client, a leading e-commerce player, with product categories such as consumer electronics, fashion, home essentials and groceries, lifestyle products and many more, approached us, they were finding it hard to keep the sellers on their platform happy as well as to track non-genuine buyers.

Their platform was being misused by errant buyers to place orders and then return them. These buyers often were other sellers who just wanted to leave a rival out-of-stock. Because the onus of the return lied with sellers, they were highly frustrated and dissatisfied. Moreover, handling of returns, in certain cases, wasn’t being properly tracked, which was causing revenue losses to our client and client’s business partners.

The challenge for our client was to minimize these instances so that they could keep their sellers on their platform as well as ensure faster disbursal of return amount to genuine customers.

Our methodology

We knew that to help our clients, we needed to build a solid pre-return verification system because this was from where all the frauds were creeping in.

By identifying customers in real time, it was possible to catch the fraudulent transactions there and then. We deployed liveness checks for verifying the identity of customers along with geo-location capturing to validate that a return was being initiated from the location that was mentioned at our client’s platform.

OCR technology was used to simplify manual return application processes such as form filling. This enabled gathering information from customers in a consistent format and reduced manual entry efforts by last mile agents.