SEON

SEON, short for "Security On," is a robust fraud protection tool covering multiple types of fraud and money laundering across dozens of industries, including eCommerce.

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You can set it up so that orders that are considered high-risk are automatically canceled and refunded, or you can set it to do a manual review and cancellation, the choice is yours. You can set your thresholds for how sensitive you want to be when deciding whether or not to accept a transaction and customer.

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They pull in real-time data from over 35 different social networks (including AirBnB and Spotify) in order to verify the authenticity of the customer through data points like their email address and phone number.

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Shopify has 10-15 very basic rules for checking for fraud, which is fine when you're a small merchant, you know your customers well, and/or you have very cheap or low Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) products that make fraud not a serious risk to your business. But as you grow, you will outgrow Shopify's basic fraud prevention technology and want a system that really understands if a "Shopify high-risk" order is actually high-risk. A tool like SEON offers more, and a truly better comparison, which means less false-positives and more orders approved.

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SEON checks things like if the customer is returning but using a new mailing address, if the IP address is from one country - but the credit card is from a different country, if they are using a VPN, and the list goes on.

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For example, if the user enters the wrong phone number and that number isn't a valid phone number, Shopify may accidentally flag this order as high-risk, based on a basic typo, whereas SEON will check that one issue with hundreds of other checks to balance out the overall likelihood of fraud.

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You can easily import white-listed and black-listed customer lists to ensure that approved email addresses are always approved and that bad actors are never approved.

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SEON makes it clear and super easy to understand as to why the order is being flagged as fraudulent so that you can really understand the risk and the actions the user is taking while attempting to purchase from you.

SEON, short for "Security On," is a robust fraud protection tool covering multiple types of fraud and money laundering across dozens of industries, including eCommerce.

​

You can set it up so that orders that are considered high-risk are automatically canceled and refunded, or you can set it to do a manual review and cancellation, the choice is yours. You can set your thresholds for how sensitive you want to be when deciding whether or not to accept a transaction and customer.

​

They pull in real-time data from over 35 different social networks (including AirBnB and Spotify) in order to verify the authenticity of the customer through data points like their email address and phone number.

​

Shopify has 10-15 very basic rules for checking for fraud, which is fine when you're a small merchant, you know your customers well, and/or you have very cheap or low Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) products that make fraud not a serious risk to your business. But as you grow, you will outgrow Shopify's basic fraud prevention technology and want a system that really understands if a "Shopify high-risk" order is actually high-risk. A tool like SEON offers more, and a truly better comparison, which means less false-positives and more orders approved.

​

SEON checks things like if the customer is returning but using a new mailing address, if the IP address is from one country - but the credit card is from a different country, if they are using a VPN, and the list goes on.

​

For example, if the user enters the wrong phone number and that number isn't a valid phone number, Shopify may accidentally flag this order as high-risk, based on a basic typo, whereas SEON will check that one issue with hundreds of other checks to balance out the overall likelihood of fraud.

​

You can easily import white-listed and black-listed customer lists to ensure that approved email addresses are always approved and that bad actors are never approved.

​

SEON makes it clear and super easy to understand as to why the order is being flagged as fraudulent so that you can really understand the risk and the actions the user is taking while attempting to purchase from you.

Many other fraud prevention tools have a selling proposition "guaranteeing and preventing chargebacks". SEON is not offering chargeback guarantee or other assurances as they may see this as a conflict of interest in that the protection company is more likely to overprotect to reduce their own liability.

Their secret sauce is their machine learning algorithm which is constantly tagging orders and their hundreds of custom attributes, and tracking which tags lead to a fraudulent order and which ones do not. Then, over time, you can automatically add new rules to your custom rules section to further prevent fraud that is specific to your business.

This superpower is especially great for companies that have a dedicated fraud prevention team, as it will help that team identify rules, track their success (or failure), and save dozens of hours in what is typically a manual review process.

Many other fraud prevention tools have a selling proposition "guaranteeing and preventing chargebacks". SEON is not offering chargeback guarantee or other assurances as they may see this as a conflict of interest in that the protection company is more likely to overprotect to reduce their own liability.

Their secret sauce is their machine learning algorithm which is constantly tagging orders and their hundreds of custom attributes, and tracking which tags lead to a fraudulent order and which ones do not. Then, over time, you can automatically add new rules to your custom rules section to further prevent fraud that is specific to your business.

This superpower is especially great for companies that have a dedicated fraud prevention team, as it will help that team identify rules, track their success (or failure), and save dozens of hours in what is typically a manual review process.

Setup can be done in 3 clicks. Simply add the app in the app store and select a plan, to get started. From there, the system is up and running and SEON is going to start checking each future order. That said, there is a near-infinite amount of flexibility in establishing your own custom rules. This can take a few hours to set up, and you may want to come in and check or change or add rules over time.

Typically the person managing this tool is the "fraud prevention specialist," which, if you don't have one person dedicated to this, is often also the head of eCommerce, head of operations, or you as the founder or owner of the company.

For merchants doing over 5,000 orders a month, you will get an onboarding specialist who will better set up your custom rules, whitelisting, etc.

SEON is best for mid-stage and growth stage brands doing 500 or more orders/month and have a reasonable average order value - above $20, because you are going to pay ~$.07 per order, which comes as a very tiny hit to profitability.

And this tool is very powerful at scale and for enterprise brands doing thousands of orders a month with dedicated fraud specialists, etc.