Avoid ecommerce fraud with the help of web scraping

E-commerce fraud is a huge problem that causes massive losses for online retailers. Fraudsters use sophisticated techniques like fake accounts, stolen payment info, and more to game the system. Luckily, web scraping provides a powerful tool to help e-commerce businesses detect and prevent fraud.

How Ecommerce Fraud Occurs

Some common types of ecommerce fraud include:

• Fake Accounts – Fake or stolen identities are used to open accounts for fraudulent purchases. It also allows them to bypass the anti-fraud systems linked to real profiles.
• Stolen Payment Info – Criminals steal credit cards and other payment details through hacking, phishing, or buying on dark websites. They use them to make purchases.
• Coupon Abuse – Fraudsters find and apply coupon codes not meant for them to get heavy discounts or free products. This impacts promotions budgets.
• Reselling- Fraudsters buy products only to resell them on other sites for profit. This limits inventory for genuine customers.
• Fake Reviews – Scammers create fake accounts to write fake positive reviews to boost product ratings.

How Web Scraping for E-commerce Helps

Web scraping provides an effective solution to detect and stop many types of ecommerce fraud:

Profile Analysis

• Web scrapers can extract data from user profiles across ecommerce sites and social networks.
• Analyzing this data can reveal connections between accounts and help identify fake profiles.
• Details like address, phone, name, etc., can be cross-checked to detect fakes.

Review Analysis

• Web scrapers can extract all reviews for products from an ecommerce site.
• Analyzing the reviewer profiles, review language, ratings, etc., can identify fraudulent reviews.
• The sources, dates, and data of reviews can be compared to detect patterns of fake reviews.

Coupon Hunting

• Web scraping bots can scour the web to find unused coupon codes for an ecommerce site.
• These codes can then be disabled or limited to stop fraud through coupon abuse.
• The terms and conditions of coupons can also be scraped to understand policies.

Price Monitoring

• Scraping competitor sites can uncover pricing trends and anomalies.
• If products are available for lower prices on other sites, it indicates potential reselling fraud.
• Scrape marketplaces like eBay as well to uncover discounted product resales.

Inventory Tracking

• Scrape product listings across an ecommerce site over time.
• Analyzing changes in inventory levels can uncover patterns suggesting reselling fraud.
• Gauging actual demand vs. inventory can indicate products targeted for fraudulent resale.

Payment Analysis

• Web scraping can gather data on all transactions and failed payments.
• Analyzing this data can detect spikes suggesting the use of stolen payment info.
• It can also identify common flags among fraudulent orders to improve detection.

Implementing Ecommerce Anti-Fraud Web Scrapers

Here are some tips for implementing web scraping as part of your ecommerce fraud prevention:

• Use robust tools – Invest in robust web scraping software optimized for large-scale data extraction, like Relu Consultancy, the best web scraping service offers. Avoid limited browser extensions or coding-focused tools.
• Scrape wisely – Don’t excessively scrape sites, as that can get you blocked. Use tactics like proxies, throttling, and anonymization to scrape undetected.
• Analyze carefully – Having scraped data is one thing, but analyzing it properly is key. Use technologies like machine learning and other AI to uncover hidden insights.
• Automate workflows – Set up automated scraping on schedules to extract data regularly. Automate analysis tasks, too, for efficient fraud detection.
• Enrich data – Combine scraped ecommerce data with other sources like emails, call logs, and payments data for a 360-degree customer view.
• Stay updated – Fraud tactics evolve, so evaluate your web scraping and anti-fraud strategies. Adjust the data points, tools, and techniques as needed.

The Bottom Line

Ecommerce fraud poses a real danger to revenues and reputation for online businesses. Web scraping offers a flexible yet efficient means of extracting data to identify threats and strengthen fraud prevention efforts.

Retailers can effectively mitigate emerging fraud trends and patterns using scraped data analytics. Scraping solutions tailored to your business provide maximum protection from online shopping scammers.

However, web scraping services in USA remain unknown to many retailers. You could benefit from engaging a professional web scraping firm and immediately exploiting its power.