A new report from Riskified has revealed that the full holiday shopping season is substantially safer for ecommerce merchants.

Dubbed ‘Unwrapping Holiday Fraud: Insights to Protect Your Business & Drive eCommerce Revenue’, it also shows that the increase in sales volume from legitimate shoppers far outpaces growth in fraud attempts, and that purchases via mobile apps are significantly safer for merchants during the holiday season than at other times of the year.

The report explains that consumer behaviours and fraud trends are not consistent throughout the year, or even the holiday season. In addition, it breaks down holiday shopping into six key sub-seasons, and it suggests that mobile app orders throughout all sub-seasons typically experience 70% fewer fraud attempts than they do during the rest of the year:

• Warmup – 24-31 October
• Pre Sales – 1-22 November
• Cyber Weekend – 23-27 November
• Pre-Christmas – 28 November- 23 December
• Christmas – 24-25 December
• After Sales – 26-31 December

Riskified cautions merchants to be aware of mixed-cart fraud that involves scenarios in which fraudsters add a few physical goods to their shopping carts with the victim’s actual shipping address and then add a digital gift card to be sent to the fraudster’s email address. Since the order of physical goods matches normal patterns, the order may appear legitimate, however, once these orders are approved, the cardholders receive items they did not order. This way, the fraudsters get the digital gift cards for which they did not pay.