Mixed martial arts gear and clothing e-retailer MMAWarehouse LLC used to devote two employees, at four hours each per day, to reviews of potentially fraudulent online orders, CEO Mika Casey says.
Since July, when MMAWarehouse installed an anti-fraud system that uses thousands of data points to sift through transactions, those workers spend no more than an hour a day on such legwork, Casey says. Casey hired vendor Signifyd in July 2015 to take over what had been a mostly manual process of reviewing orders that the previous anti-fraud vendor had flagged as needing scrutiny. About15% of orders required reviews under the old system, and now that’s down to less than 5%, he says.
Web-only MMAWarehouse, with 20 employees and more than $10 million in yearly revenue, does 80% of its business in the United States and 20% in such international markets as Australia and Canada.The retailer sells gear and apparel for wrestling, jiu-jitsu, boxing, karate, kickboxing, judo and related mixed martial arts sports. MMAWarehouse is No. 827 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Second 500 Guide.
“The previous vendor scored our orders for potential fraud, but the rest of the legwork was ours,” Casey says. “There wasn’t a manual. We had to see how other merchants did it and look through social media, white pages and other examples. Sometimes it was a judgment call. It definitely wasn’t our expertise, and I didn’t think it ever would be. Now, we can take care of customers and take away the burden of having to decision our own orders.”
Signifyd promises retail clients a money-back guarantee for any approved transactions that turn out to be fraudulent.
A smaller retailer downloads Signifyd’s free app through its e-commerce platform—MMAWarehouse uses Shopify—either to use Signifyd’s software only when the retailer requests it or to review every transaction. Signifyd charges a percentage of revenue for each approved order. The percentage varies depending on the merchant’s size, order volume, risk level and other factors, says Raj Ramanand, co-founder and CEO of Signifyd.
Larger Signifyd clients, including online marketplace Jet.com, apparel brand Lacoste, jeweler Shane Co., apparel resale site Tradesy and Peet’s Coffee, connect to the software through an application programming interface to pass through their orders and to receive information back from Signifyd.
Retailers realize an average 15-20% increase in gross profits after implementing Signifyd, the vendor says.
Signifyd’s system reviews a consumer’s online and offline actions to help retailers reduce their exposure to chargebacks and fraud, Ramanand says. Chargebacks are payment transactions that payment card networks such as Visa and MasterCard reverse, taking the funds from a merchant’s account. Typically this occurs after a legitimate cardholder denies making the purchase or claims the products were damaged or otherwise faulty, and the card companies decide the merchant was at fault.
Signifyd scores every order on a 5,000-point scale to let retailers assess the risk involved in approving the transaction.
“We are crunching public records, social profiles, how shoppers check out on a website, their shipping information, who owns the phone, whether the transaction is mobile or IP-based and other such factors that help us get more granular and precise in the data mining,” Ramanand says.
Signifyd, which has more than 3,000 retail customers, on Feb. 25 raised $20 million in a funding round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Allegis Capital, IA Ventures, QED Investors, Bill McKiernan and Tim Eades. The Series B financing brings Signifyd’s fundraising to $31 million.
Signifyd, with 50 employees, will use the new money to hire more senior executives and double its salesforce. It also plans to expand its back-end systems and hire more engineers, Ramanand says.