U.S. and Canadian Online Retailers: 21 Percent of Orders From Overseas
By Anna Johnson on March 1st, 2010A recent survey of 352 U.S. and Canadian merchants accepting international orders shows that 21 percent of their online orders came from abroad in 2009, up from 17 percent the year before and 8 percent in 2005.
And although overseas orders have traditionally been associated with a higher incidence of fraud and credit card rejections, such merchants saw 50 percent lower fraud rates and 30 percent lower order rejection rates.
Doug Schwegman, CyberSource’s Director, Customer and Market Intelligence said:
“We think the trend was driven in part by merchants’ needs to find new sources of revenue in a challenged economy, but also by merchants’ growing ability to manage fraud on international orders.”
Of course, most U.S. and Canadian merchants accepting overseas orders predominately dealt with customers from countries with similar law and law enforcement frameworks as those in North America.
In 2009, 81 percent of merchants took orders from the U.K.; 72 percent from Australia; 71 percent from Germany; 68 percent from France; and 64 percent from both Italy and Mexico.
U.S. and Canadian merchants still cited orders from some areas of the world as risky. Last year, 20 percent of U.S. and Canadian merchants that took orders from abroad stopped accepting orders from at least one country due to high fraud levels.
Among that group, 50 percent cited Nigeria and 45 percent cited Ghana as countries they would no longer accept orders from. 30 percent of merchants stopped taking orders from Indonesia or Malaysia and other countries dropped were Iran, Pakistan, Romania or Russia (23 percent of merchants), and China or Vietnam (20 percent of merchants).
