Retail
Fraud Prevention for Retail and E-commerce
The retail fraud landscape in 2025-2026
Retail is one of the highest-fraud verticals in digital commerce. According to the National Retail Federation, 15.8% of all merchandise sold in 2025 was returned, representing $849.9 billion in returned goods – with 9% of those returns estimated to be fraudulent. Beyond returns, retailers face accelerating threats across the entire customer journey: account takeovers at login, card testing at checkout, promotion and loyalty abuse, and increasingly sophisticated first-party misuse by customers who have learned to exploit policy gaps.
The fraud challenge for retail isn’t just the volume – it’s the variety. A single retail platform may face bot-driven credential stuffing attacks on customer accounts, organized return fraud rings exploiting lenient policies, and synthetic identity fraud at new account creation, all simultaneously. Accertify protects retailers across all of these vectors through a single integrated platform that spans account creation, authentication, payment decisioning, and dispute management.
Retail fraud threats Accertify addresses
Account takeover and credential stuffing. Retail loyalty accounts are high-value targets. Attackers use stolen credential lists to access accounts containing stored payment methods, loyalty points, and purchase history. Accertify’s Account Protection monitors every login and account event in real time, using device intelligence, behavioral analytics, and consortium data to distinguish legitimate customers from attackers — without adding friction for good users.
Return fraud and first-party abuse. Wardrobing, label manipulation, empty box returns, and claiming items not received are among the most costly and fastest-growing fraud vectors in retail. Accertify’s CARE (Claims, Adjustments, Returns, Exchanges) solution monitors returns behavior across the customer lifecycle, identifying abusive patterns and enabling retailers to apply targeted friction to high-risk return requests while preserving a seamless experience for genuine customers.
Payment fraud and chargebacks. Card-not-present fraud remains acute in ecommerce retail. Accertify’s fraud decisioning platform combines machine learning models, community data from billions of transactions, and configurable rules to accurately approve good transactions and block fraudulent ones – reducing both fraud losses and false declines that cost retailers revenue.
Bot attacks and card testing. Automated attacks probe retail checkout flows to validate stolen card numbers at scale. Accertify’s Account Protection detects and blocks bot activity in real time, including sophisticated bots that mimic human behavioral patterns.
Proven results in retail
Guitar Center deployed Accertify’s fraud management platform and reduced chargeback losses by 62%, doubled fraud savings year over year, and decreased manual review rates by 10% – even as online sales grew 21%.
Target Australia implemented a multi-layered fraud prevention strategy with Accertify, increasing frictionless customer journeys to 99% while maintaining strong fraud controls across a high-volume e-commerce environment.
Fnac Darty, one of Europe’s largest consumer electronics and cultural goods retailers, reduced their card chargeback rate by more than 30% while simultaneously reducing manual review volume through Accertify’s integrated fraud and chargeback management platform.
Why retailers choose Accertify
Retailers don’t need another point solution. They need a platform that connects account protection, payment fraud decisioning, returns abuse prevention, and chargeback management in a single unified view – because fraudsters don’t attack in silos, and neither should your defenses.