FUGU

FUGU is a fraud prevention tool with a unique angle: they follow the purchaser after the purchase to better calculate the risk of fraud.

They work to prevent the need for manual reviews, prevent false positive frauds, and prevent churn from customers.

Their tool works in 4 stages:

Initial risk profiling at the moment of purchase

Post-checkout monitoring and Know Your Customer (KYC) automation

Pre-shipment risk scoring

Post-delivery chargeback management (for any chargebacks that do actually occur)FUGU reduces the Declined orders By Merchant (DBM) by 50%, putting more money in your pocket with no risk to you (since they are handling the chargeback).

So if they approve an order and it ends up being a fraudulent chargeback, they will cover the lost revenue. And even if you have a chargeback for broken goods or lost product, they will handle the risk and compliance component of fighting that chargeback.

FUGU supports Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) solutions, recurring billing solutions, micro-payment solutions, and Point of Sales (POS) solutions.

If you're already using a fraud prevention tool, FUGU will take a look at your numbers, mostly your DBM (Declined orders) and they can sit on top of your existing fraud prevention tool, only handling the orders that are declined by that tool, taking a look at them, and typically reducing your declined orders by 50%, which is more money in your pocket!

FUGU starts with 5 pre-built scenarios, and then you can create simple and complex rules and scenarios to hold, change tax, or send transactions to a manual approval process. For example, if you get a high amount of orders sent to PO Boxes, or an order for an insanely large amount of money (like if your average order value is $100 and you get a transaction for $30,000... This should probably be flagged for manual review).

Their machine learning algorithm has caught all sorts of interesting cases of fraud including shipping to warehouses and other industrial areas that likely mean the buyer is a reseller, or even a unique case where the customer is buying all different sizes of the same pair of jeans, which implies they are reselling and may be trying to use some sort of discount code loophole, or just planning on charging back the order after they receive the product and then slanging your jeans on the street.

Following the purchaser after the purchase is really unique. FUGU is taking that extra step to really determine if fraud is occurring, and by covering the costs of orders they say are not fraudulent that actually turn out to be - they are highly incentivized to get it right.

Fewer declined orders = more revenue.

FUGU uses sentiment analysis, device signature, geolocation, and a whole bunch of other factors, pushed through a machine learning algorithm to create a risk score that effectively reduces false positives by ~40%, reduces friendly fraud by 50%, and reduces disputes recovered by 60%. This is going to save you time in customer service costs, warehouse management time, actual product costs, etc.

Typically someone within operations or finance are going to be the first person to see fraud prevention as an opportunity for improving revenue margins, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and all the other important value metrics. You may have one person dedicated to risk, fraud, and compliance, and they may be the one pushing for a solution like this. In a smaller business, it could be marketing, the CEO, or even someone in customer service who is seeing a lot of chargeback issues.

FUGU can be installed on any store within a few minutes. If they don't have a direct integration, they will install their webhooks for you. As an operations or compliance manager (or even as an eCommerce manager), you don't really have to do anything, the tool just works for you. You can come in to the tool from time to time just to check performance, get some metrics, make any adjustments and move on.

FUGU will work for merchants of any size, but the more orders you have, the more valuable their tool will be. Typically you want to be doing at least $2mm in annual revenue or about 1,000 orders a month to really see a strong enough revenue difference using them.

FUGU may not work for high risk brands, you will need to talk with their team if you fall into that category and see if they are right for you.