A successful hype sale mustn’t harm the user experience

The aptly named “hype sale” is all the rage in today’s online landscape. The successor to the brick-and-mortar doorbuster, hype sales drive massive traffic and sell out exclusive physical and digital goods in record time.

NFTs. Concert tickets. Collectible cards. Companies can hype up practically anything. Sneakers—yes, that includes Crocs—move the needle like no other.

However, what’s moving that needle is where the problem lies. Footwear hype sales attract millions of bots, mostly scalper bots, that easily beat out the sneakerheads waiting torturously in the online queue. 

Ostensibly, e-commerce companies should be pleased. After all, isn’t the point to sell inventory? But, lost in the drummed-up excitement and revenue spike, is bots’ impact on the user experience (UX). In a bot-eat-bot world, can hype sales drive maximum profits without disappointing sneaker fans?

Bots are here to stay (and wreak havoc)

Between March 3, 2020 and January 2, 2021, scalper bots were responsible for almost 50% of shopping cart requests. The ubiquity of these bots can be tied to their accessibility: finding them is a cinch, and deployment doesn’t require black-hatter expertise.

Scalpers have a smorgasbord of bots at their disposal. Scalpers looking to flip sneakers for profit use “All In One” bots (AIO), such as Stellara or Dragon AIO. After procuring an AIO bot on either the dark web or Discord, sometimes for as much as $50K, scalpers can then buy sneakers from more than one website—faster and more intelligently than any single human could.

Scalpers covet bots, including the AIO variety, as much as the exclusive items themselves. Demand is so high, in fact, that sometimes they use a bot to buy a bot, and bots are flipped for thousands of dollars just like the products they help purchase. With the multibillion-dollar reseller market continuing to thrive—thanks in part to the pandemic’s influx of remote entrepreneurialism—the message is clear: bots are here to stay (and infuriate legitimate sneaker buyers).

Hype sale mayhem

If a glamorous new sneaker is up for grabs, bots are guaranteed to show up and wipe out the inventory. This can be brutal on an e-tailer’s server and web resources. Sophisticated bots can even grab sneakers from inventory management systems before they’re available for purchase.

It goes without saying that bot detection and mitigation is crucial. Aside from protecting the hopes and dreams of legitimate sneaker collectors, too many bots could crash a website or app altogether. But an all-out assault on bots isn’t the move: some bots are actually genuine customers trying to outmaneuver the bad bots.

Installing a bot mitigation solution, to separate the good bots from the bad, is a start. Yet, it still doesn’t do much to assuage those real customers who don’t have the luxury of a bot—those bot-less sneaker aficionados who lose out and then watch bot-assisted purchasers gloat on social media afterwards.

These customers are likely to churn, and they could drag a brand’s reputation through the dirt on their way out. If a company’s plan is to alleviate its bot problem—without damaging its brand image and UX—it might be time to focus on the humans.

Banking on trust

Maximizing hype sale profits while appeasing bot-less customers is, admittedly, a tough nut to crack. A blanket approach to neutralizing bots will also affect the good bots, and nets a less spectacular financial outcome. Meanwhile, a lax strategy that lets too many bots in might severely compromise UX and cause reputational harm.

We don’t have a silver-bullet solution to this problem (no one does), but we have an idea: focus on trust, not risk.

Assuming an e-tailer has a bot mitigation platform in place, it behooves the merchant to then verify the users in the waiting room and ensure the legitimate human customers are granted preferential treatment. This means moving them up the queue, ahead of bots, and drastically improving their chances of achieving sneakerhead nirvana.

This, of course, requires a stockpile of real-time identity intelligence that uses trust signals—geography, device ID, etc.—to seamlessly authenticate customers. Big shoes to fill. But Deduce is up for it.

Our Identity Network, the largest real-time identity graph for fraud in the US, spans more than 500 million unique user profiles and over 1.4 billion daily activities from 150,000+ websites and apps. If trust is indeed the key to balancing hype sale success with a seamless UX, there’s no better compliment to a bot mitigation solution.

Want to learn more about how Deduce prioritizes trust to facilitate the user experience? Contact us today.

Continuous authentication is no longer exclusive to big tech

Amazon’s Prime Day was last week, the annual free-for-all in which Prime subscribers jostle for exclusive deals. Amazon’s hefty stockpile of data (and identity intelligence) enables shoppers to jump on and off the site or app without having to reauthenticate, boosting their chances of snagging their favorite moisturizer or air fryer.

Thankfully, for companies not in the FAANG Gang, Deduce’s real-time identity intelligence provides the same convenience. This “continuous authentication” feature, which keeps trusted users logged in for 30 days (or longer—this is SecOps configurable), can now create a frictionless customer journey for all B2C companies, even if their CEO doesn’t moonlight as an astronaut. Implementation is just as seamless—without sacrificing security.

Here is why continuous authentication, and frictionless real-time digital identity verification, are central to the consumer journey, what this looks like in action, and how Deduce makes it happen.

It all starts with identity

All consumer journeys start with identity. Verifying users instantly without having them enter their username and password upon each visit goes a long way in facilitating these journeys.

Per a FIDO Alliance report, more than 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned by existing customers due to false positive challenges. Today’s customer is busy, impatient, and short on attention span. They aren’t too thrilled about logging back in for checkout or using a valid credit card and seeing the transaction wrongly declined. Companies feel the hurt of false positives, too. Every triggered multi-factor authentication (MFA) represents a costly trifacta for businesses: lost revenue, reputational damage, and churn, which potentially impacts lifetime customer value.

Delivering a smooth user experience hinges on correctly identifying legitimate customers, instantaneously. Implementing continuous authentication throughout a user’s session keeps them engaged and decreases the likelihood of cart abandonment and/or churn.

The nitty-gritty

So, how does continuous authentication actually work?

We’ve all seen the “Remember Me” box underneath login forms. Depending on the app, ticking this box activates one of two implementations: users only need to enter their password moving forward; or, most conveniently, they’ll bypass login entirely for a period of time.

Continuous authentication, including passwordless login, gives security teams the chills, but Deduce’s behavioral intelligence and real-time risk and trust signals make sure that only legitimate customers, not bad actors, are granted this privilege. After an identity is verified via risk and trust signals across network, device, geography, and activity, a customer can be issued a session extension cookie. Essentially a security token, this extension tells the authentication solution that a user is trustworthy and can be fast-tracked to check-out.

The best part about Deduce’s continuous authentication is that a user’s identity is secure even when they are not using a company’s website. If a user’s credentials are compromised on another site or app within the Deduce Identity Network, their session extension is revoked and they must reauthenticate upon return. Conversely, if the user has authenticated elsewhere on the Deduce Identity Network, that authentication is applied to their identity in real-time and they won’t need to authenticate again on other sites.

Without the required amount of data, however—on par with the likes of Amazon and Google and Apple—continuous authentication and 30+ day session extensions aren’t possible. Unless…

Not your average data stack

Don’t let data limitations get in the way of your continuously authenticated dreams. Deduce’s augmentative solution, fueled by the largest identity graph in the US, layers on top of a company’s existing data stack and effectively levels the playing field.

The Deduce Identity Network packs the identity intelligence needed to pull off continuous authentication and prevent false positive MFA challenges while neutralizing fraudsters, regardless of a company’s size. This network comprises 500M+ unique identity profiles that generate more than 1.4B daily interactions, meaning that Deduce sees the majority of the U.S. population transact in real-time, multiple times per week. As risk data evolves, our identity-backed, machine learning-driven, real-time behavioral intelligence adjusts accordingly.

Legacy identity fraud prevention solutions dependent on static data (name, address, mother’s maiden name, etc.) are no match for today’s fraudsters, and certainly can’t be trusted to power extended login sessions. Static data is more likely to have been compromised by major data breaches and trafficked to cybercriminals on the dark web. Legacy solutions also install their software on websites and apps using JavaScript, far less efficient than Deduce’s no-code integration that integrates within seconds.

With Deduce’s real-time digital identity verification, users bypass manual login for extended periods and enjoy an equally swift account creation process. Businesses and their UX teams, meanwhile, can create a frictionless consumer journey that doesn’t skimp on security, a Trusted User Experience that keeps customers coming back for more.