Why 73% of Your Declined Orders Are Actually Good Customers

Steve Hutt (0:00)

All right, just before we get started, I want to tell you about the Shopify app I think a lot of growing brands should know about, and it's called Plitics. Now, Plitics is a multi-store AI bulk editor that makes managing product content on Shopify actually scalable. Now, after six years inside Shopify and running my own brand, I really wish that a tool like this had been around back then. Because once your catalog gets serious, Shopify alone starts to break down. Like, try a simple find and replace across your product descriptions. You'll end up exporting to a spreadsheet, making the change, and then importing back just to update one phrase. And multiply that across translations and variants, and even missing meta fields, and then you've burned a week. Especially if you've got like a thousand or more SKUs, or you're adding 50 or more products a month. Now, I've known about Plitics for a while, but I didn't think much of them for Shopify. But recently, I took another look, and they're now laser focused on Shopify-specific problems and helping brands adopt what they call content-led growth. And that means like better product content drives more discoverability and better sales across Shopify marketplaces and the incredibly important and emerging world of AI shopping. And their credentials in the ecosystem are real, too. They are the number one product information management software, or PIM, on G2, five years running, and are now ranked the number four for best commerce software this year alone. So if your team is losing hours on manual product edits, grab Plitics app for free in the Shopify App Store, or you can head on over to plitics.com/fastlane.

That's plytics.com/fastlane.

All right, let's jump into today's episode.

Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane, I'm your host Steve Hutt. Now today's conversation is all about fraud and maybe the good customers that we lose trying to stop it. Now if you've ever canceled a risky looking order in your Shopify admin and never really found out whether that customer was real, this episode is for you. Now according to Signifyd data, they say that, I just read, about 73% of declined orders are actually good customers. And that's revenue that you've already paid to acquire and literally it's walking out the door. Now my guest today is Nicole Jass, she's the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Strategy at Signifyd. And before Signifyd, Nicole was the Chief Product Officer at the identity company called Prove, and even before that, she spent a few years on the product side over at WorldPay. So she kind of is seeing fraud from both the payment side and the identity side, and now she's on the merchant side, so it's quite interesting. And so we cover a lot of ground on this episode. Things like, you know, why fraud is growing faster than e-commerce itself, and you know, how AI is handling these kind of amateur fraudsters, and kind of the playbook of kind of organized fraud rings, and things like, you know, what a card-testing attack actually looks like from the inside, or you know, how fraud has moved beyond checkout into things like account takeover, I've never even thought about this, but like loyalty points and returns, and you know, and where Shopify Protect actually stops covering you, like especially if you ship outside the US.

And finally, you know, like what AI shopping agents change about who or what is placing your orders. That's quite interesting. It's a really exciting topic. So with the holiday traffic, really, it's really starting to ramp up right now. And I think there's a wave of, I would call them first time customers, but they're going to be hitting your store very soon, if not already. And I think the timing of this particular episode couldn't be better. So hi, Nicole. Great to have you on the show.

Nicole Jass (4:06)

Hey, Steve. Thanks a lot for having me.

Steve Hutt (4:07)

My pleasure. So you were on the payment side and the identity side. What did it teach you about fraud when you're at those companies that you believe maybe most merchants are missing right now?

Nicole Jass (4:21)

Yeah. Yeah. No, great question. So, you know, when I was at, I was at World Pay on the product side for quite a long time and always got to work on what I called the fun products. They were like the identity and fraud and loyalty, anything that had to do with data that kind of the exhaust that comes off of payments and the data that we can collect and what we could do there for our merchants. And what I found fascinating about fraud and you hit on it very early on, is it's a two-sided problem. And if you rotate one way too much, then the other side kicks in. And what I mean by that is if you over rotate on trying to make sure you stop the fraud and reduce the chargebacks, chances are you're turning away good customers. And on the flip side, if you're over worried about, just get my good customers in and approve, approve, approve, uh-oh, you open the floodgates for the fraudsters. So that's kind of what I found so fascinating was the nature of the problem and really having to tackle both sides together.