Transaction volume, frequency, and value usually increase during peak season. Because there are generally more transactions, the number of chargebacks and fraudulent transactions increases as well. At the same time, legitimate shoppers might purchase more products, more often, and the average transaction value rises. Patterns that seem suspicious during other periods of the year can be completely legitimate during peak season.
To manage these and other risks, we recommend that you use Protect, our risk engine. Protect is part of Adyen Uplift and uses advanced machine learning capabilities to help legitimate shoppers complete their purchase. This lets you increase conversion while keeping fraud under control.
General recommendations
Send in high-quality data in payment requests
- Make sure that you send in high-quality data to ensure the best performance, and that data collection to detect fraud is enabled.
Use Protect and enable premium risk features
Learn more about Protect and premium risk features, and consider the following for peak season:
- Use Protect to help distinguish fraudulent activity from legitimate changes in shopper behavior.
- Enable premium risk features for more advanced AI-powered functionality, such as risk-based authentication, the machine learning fraud risk rule, custom rules, and risk profile analytics. Premium features have to be configured on your account and involve additional risk fees.
Review Customer Area roles for your team
- Make sure that your team is ready to manage and monitor risk and disputes by checking that they have the required Customer Area user roles.
Review risk profiles and rules
- Check that all merchant accounts have been assigned to a Protect risk profile.
- If you have enabled post-authorization rules for AVS or CVC, consider disabling these because there is a risk of shopper input errors for both the address details and the CVC field. Enabling these rules may result in a higher number of declined transactions because of mismatches. Instead of using post-authorization rules, we recommend that you use the Adyen Uplift Optimize settings. In the smart payment messaging section, we recommend to select Allow security field optimizations on low risk transactions only.
- Protect premium: review Adyen Uplift recommendations to see if there are underperforming custom risk rules that you should address.
Review 3D Secure settings
Make sure that the following settings are suitable for peak season:
- Check your default 3D Secure rule setting and review any dynamic 3D Secure rules.
- Protect premium: review any custom Check for 3DS rules that trigger dynamic 3D Secure rules.
- As an extra safeguard to block transactions that do not have a liability shift, set up and enable the post-authorization rule Liability shift status blocked.
Monitor performance
- Monitor for any anomalies during peak season. Use the Risk & dispute analytics dashboard to analyze overall dispute and fraud rates, or dive deeper into risk performance by filtering views.
- If the number of transactions blocked by Protect increases unexpectedly, use the Blocked by risk tab to investigate the affected transactions and risk rules before changing your risk setup.
- In the Adyen Uplift overview, look at fraud rates to evaluate how your risk setup is doing.
- Protect premium: view risk profile analytics to see how specific risk profiles perform.
Avoid scripted attacks
Several features help you block fraudulent transactions and mitigate the effect of scripted attacks.
For example, data collection helps identify fraudulent activity on your website. This data is one of the sources for the machine learning bot attack risk rule in Protect.
We recommend that you monitor risk performance to detect signs of a fraud attack. For example, look for activities such as an increase in issuer refusal rates, or payment attempts with zero-value or very small amounts. It is important to confirm that these activities are indeed fraudulent before you take further action. When you confirm that the activity is suspicious, you can:
- Block BINs that are used in the attack by adding them to a risk list.
- Temporarily add a Dynamic 3D Secure rule to always request a challenge.
- Protect premium: add custom rules to address patterns that you have identified.
Handle disputes
Make sure that your team is ready to handle and monitor disputes.
- Review the dispute process and flow.
- Monitor incoming disputes. In your Customer Area, in the Notification center, enable the Chargeback notices for incoming disputes, and regularly check the Risk & dispute analytics dashboard. See Monitor performance for what to check.
- If a transaction seems fraudulent, block shipping and refund the transaction to avoid a chargeback and any fees related to high chargeback volumes.