February 25, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Content Team
The United States is known for having some of the biggest names in ecommerce in the entire world with brands like Amazon, Ebay, Overstock.com, and others popular throughout the world. However, those shoppers located outside of the U.S. who are interested in putting something in their shopping carts, have not had the best of luck. This is because many online retailers have been slower to adopt international shipping, and those who have been shipping internationally have had to combat various forms of fraud. Luckily this trend is changing and more products from US online sites are being shipping internationally, as fraud declines. Recently the CyberSource Corporation released their 11th annual Online Fraud Report, in which a number of statistics relating to international fraud were brought to light. Their ecommerce survey reports that US/Canadian merchants are accepting more international orders, which represents 21% of online orders, compared to only 17% in the prior year. In 2005 this figure was only 8%, which illustrated how much progress the global ecommerce market has made to ensure people from across the world have the options to order products online.
One of the key factors in the rise of online orders is that issues with fraudulent orders have been dramatically reduced by about 50%. In addition, the order rejection rates are declining which has helped contribute to overall growth. This is not to say that online fraud is not occurring with international orders, but it seems to be certain in countries like Niger, Ghana, and Malaysia which drive the bulk of fraud. The most positive take away from this study is that the global exchange of goods is improving and it can only help benefit the world economy which has suffered for the past couple years. Many ecommerce companies and industry analysts are awaiting Q4 2010, to see if the positive trends in the economy will correlate to a significant year-over-year increase in online sales.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
