Building Off the Off-Season
A guide to optimizing your Q1 downtime
By Lilach BaumerJanuary 2022
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Inside this guide
Merchants look forward to the holiday season and its revenue, but know that skyrocketing traffic and sales result in heightened fraud, inventory and fulfillment issues, and overwhelmed customer support teams. The ramifications – chargebacks galore, dissatisfied customers, and less money coming in – roll in with the new year. Savvy merchants, however, can leverage Q1 to create post-holiday growth by safely incentivizing account creation and offering loyalty-building policies and promotions, while also taking steps to avoid fraud-related pitfalls and decentivize bad actors. This guide discusses how retailers can future-proof against the holiday season’s downfalls and leverage this period as part of their full-year growth strategy.
Understand your chargeback rate—and control it year-round
Dispute chargebacks to recoup costs and dissuade repeat offenders
Focus on customer retention to ensure future growth
Return and refund abuse: shift from cutting costs to maximizing revenue
What can we learn from the first holiday season under PSD2?
Chargebacks and disputes
Learn how the holiday season’s fraud profile impacts your Q1 chargebacks and potential disputes, and the difference between physical and digital goods
Retention
Turning new customers into repeat ones is the real opportunity of the season. Read how account creation—and protection—impacts your customer lifetime value
Policy abuse
A deluge of returns follows the holiday season, and with it, return and refund abuse. What can merchants do to protect themselves?
Return and refund abuse costs merchants over $25 billion yearly. Before you blame fraudsters – much of it is carried out by legitimate, paying customers.
January is a good time to take an earnest look at your holiday promo strategy – and find out who, other than new and loyal customers, has been using them.
Merchants are especially vulnerable to ATO attacks during the holidays. Read more for a breakdown of the consequences and tips to handle them.