What KYC platform can help you onboard customers in e-commerce and reduce fraud during Black Friday?

During Black Friday, your store gets flooded with first-time shoppers, promo code redemptions, and orders, all packed into a few frantic days. That surge is great for revenue, but it also makes it much harder to tell who’s a real customer and who isn’t.

A jump in new account sign-ups could mean your latest campaign is working, or it could be a coordinated group abusing your promotions. An unusually big order might come from a very enthusiastic shopper, or from someone using a stolen account.

You need to tell the difference quite quickly, all without sending every customer through manual review queues or extra identity checks that make them abandon their carts. As such, pairing identity verification with your fraud controls lets you assess risk in real time while keeping checkout quick for the people who are there to buy.

GBG is an example of a KYC platform that can help onboard customers in e-commerce and reduce fraud during Black Friday.

Why Black Friday puts pressure on e-commerce identity verification

During major sales events, retailers see a sharp increase in traffic, often from new customers who haven't shopped with them before. This can put extra pressure on existing identity verification processes, especially when large numbers of customers need to be verified in a short period.

Some of the most common challenges during high-volume sales include:

• You know less about your customers. With so many shoppers who have no purchase history, you have far less first-party data to judge whether a new account or order is genuine.
• Your promotions attract abuse. Fraudsters see discounts as an opening. They set up multiple accounts, tweak identity details and go after your new-customer offers and referral bonuses.
• Real shoppers can look suspicious. Genuine buyers place bigger orders than usual, shop from places you haven’t seen before or place several orders one after the other (for example, if they’ve forgotten to buy something the first time around).
• More work for your fraud team. An increase in flagged transactions means more cases to review, which can delay legitimate orders and make it harder to identify suspicious activity.
• More customers abandoning purchases. Lengthy verification checks and unnecessary document uploads can frustrate shoppers and lead them to abandon their purchases.

Each of these problems is easier to handle when you’ve set your verification rules before the sale starts, so here’s how to get ready.

Before Black Friday: Get your verification and fraud rules ready

Review and adjust your verification rules ahead of the sale so you don't have to make changes while traffic is at its peak.

Know what “normal” looks like for you

Pull your historical data on registrations, logins, order values, purchase frequency, promo usage, and chargebacks, then segment it by customer type, product category and market. 

Compare past sales events with ordinary days because a burst of new accounts that looks alarming in September might be business as usual on Black Friday. Having a clear picture of normal customer activity helps your systems identify genuinely suspicious behavior without flagging every increase in traffic as potential fraud.

Decide where identity checks actually matter

Focus identity verification on the points where fraud poses the greatest risk, such as account creation, high-value purchases, account recovery, and age-restricted sales. An increase in traffic doesn't necessarily mean you need to introduce additional checks for every customer.

Consider when a database check is enough to verify someone's details and when you need stronger verification, such as a government ID or biometric check. 

For example, you might apply fewer checks to returning customers with a history of legitimate purchases, while requiring additional verification from new customers making high-value purchases.

Tighten your promo and sign-up rules

Consider how customers might misuse new-customer discounts, referral codes or loyalty rewards. For example, someone might create multiple accounts using the same device or similar personal details to claim a welcome discount several times.

Set rules for how your system responds to suspicious activity. Depending on the risk, you might require additional identity verification or prevent an account from using a promotion. 

However, avoid flagging customers based on a single shared detail, as people in the same household may legitimately use the same address or device.

Make sure your verification can handle the load

Find out how fast your identity queries return and what happens when a match is inconclusive. Fallback data sources should be ready so one missed match doesn’t mean an automatic rejection. 

Test your e-commerce onboarding workflows under expected peak loads, and confirm your manual review capacity and escalation paths can cope with technical failures or a sudden referral surge.

How GBG helps retailers manage fraud before, during and after peak shopping events

Everything above comes down to one challenge: telling genuine shoppers from fraudsters when you have little history to go on and no time to spare.

GBG is an identity verification and KYC & KYB provider that combines customer identity data, digital intelligence, fraud monitoring and workflow orchestration. Through GBG Go, you can access 110+ identity and fraud modules through a single platform and API, so you can configure verification for different customer interactions and risk scenarios. 

The table below shows how GBG can help retailers manage common fraud challenges during busy sales periods.

Here is an example look at how you can apply these capabilities:

Set up verification for the demand you expect

Expecting a surge of new shoppers? GBG Go lets you build separate verification paths for routine signups, inconclusive matches and higher-risk customers. 

Multi-source verification draws on global data to confirm identities, and automatic waterfalls move on to the next source whenever an initial lookup comes back incomplete. Because the workflow builder is no-code, your compliance team can adjust rules on its own instead of waiting for developers.

Spot suspicious activity and add checks only where you need them

Say you launch a new-customer discount and signups spike. It could be your marketing working, or it could be coordinated promo abuse. GBG Trust helps you tell which by bringing in cross-industry intelligence, surfacing suspicious patterns across retail platforms that might not show up in your own history.

GBG can weigh identity data, email age, mobile signals and location consistency to decide if a shopper needs step-up verification. When you need stronger proof, document verification runs 50+ forensic checks, and facial matching with passive liveness confirms the person is physically present. 

Genuine buyers pass through without extra steps, and only suspicious orders get a closer look.

Make Black Friday fraud prevention part of your year-round strategy

Black Friday brings an increased risk of fraud, but retailers need to balance fraud prevention with a smooth customer experience, especially during Black Friday. The challenge is identifying suspicious activity without introducing unnecessary verification checks that could discourage legitimate customers from completing their purchases.

Reviewing your verification rules before major sales events, monitoring identity and fraud signals during busy periods, and analyzing the results afterward can help you improve your approach over time.

GBG Go helps retailers do this by bringing together identity verification, cross-industry fraud intelligence and configurable workflows in one platform.

Book a demo with GBG to learn how our identity verification and fraud prevention solutions can support your e-commerce business during peak shopping events.

FAQs

What's the difference between identity verification and fraud detection in e-commerce?

Identity verification confirms that submitted personal details match authoritative public, credit, or government records. Fraud detection evaluates digital signals, device data and behavioral patterns to determine whether the person submitting those details is the legitimate owner and whether the transaction poses a risk.

How does location intelligence help prevent Black Friday fraud?

Location intelligence validates and standardizes delivery addresses at entry to ensure they exist and are deliverable. It also compares the shipping address with IP geolocations and device locations to detect proxy usage, VPNs or addresses linked to known fraud networks.

How do cross-industry data networks help stop promotion abuse?

Cross-industry networks like GBG Trust aggregate transaction and identity insights across multiple sectors. This reveals suspicious patterns, such as the same phone number, email domain, or device attempting multiple account registrations across different online stores, that an individual retailer may not detect using its own records alone.