COMPLIANCE & RGULATION: E-COMMERCE
Hot to shop Despite international travel bans, the UK remains the shopping destination of choice for millions of JCB cardmembers in Asia. Nick Fisher, General Manager for UK Sales & Marketing, says multi-factor authentication won’t put them off Name the keenest region for buying UK consumer goods. Still thinking? According to international payment giant JCB, it’s Japan. Figures from its 2021 Business Without Borders report, show shoppers in its home country simply cannot get enough of the stuff: 73 per cent of JCB’s Japanese cardmembers are doing most of their virtual shopping with UK retailers – up from 59 per cent in 2019. Meanwhile, its Chinese users have clearly been enjoying a virtual trolley dash around UK department stores. These destination retailers – normally high on Chinese tourists’ must-see lists – also saw their share of online spend increase substantially over 2019/20. JCB cardmember spending patterns in other countries in the Asia Pacific region showed a similar trajectory. Pent-up demand resulting from their inability to visit outlets in person during the pandemic, means any retailer not offering them online purchasing power is missing an expensive trick.
Pre-pandemic, analysts predicted that shoppers from the APAC region would be spending $32.6trillion by 2026; JCB itself witnessed e-commerce spend in Europe and the UK ramp up 300 per cent in the three years prior to the pandemic, largely fuelled by a perception that the region’s goods are of a higher quality than those they buy at home. And travel bans clearly haven’t dampened their enthusiasm. But there’s a problem. The average online cart abandonment rate among shoppers in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region is the highest in the world. They walk away from purchases 76.3 per cent of the time, leading to an estimated annual loss of as much as $18billion for merchants worldwide. So, it’s critical to make the path to a sale as frictionless as possible for those customers, says JCB’s general manager for UK sales and marketing, Nick Fisher. And that’s a challenge for merchants, particularly in the
UK and Europe, where tightening payment security protocols adopted by all the global card schemes could, it’s been suggested, push cart abandonment rates higher. Fisher is confident that retailers can continue to benefit from the current digital bonanza if they’re alert to what attracts – and dissuades – digital visitors in Southeast Asia from using their shopping channel. As much as these shoppers might have a low threshold to clunky digital journeys, they place a high value on security. “In fact, the compromise of an individual’s data is one of the key threats to the success of e-commerce,” says Fisher. Deloitte’s 2021 report, Emerging Digital Life In South And South East Asia, points to the fact 32 per cent of Thai technical professionals, for example, had personally experienced e-commerce payment fraud in the past year, an example of Asian consumers’ growing awareness of their vulnerability. Which is why, JCB has introduced its own, updated version of *EMV 3-D Secure, J/Secure™ 2.0, which helps bring the card scheme into line with Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) regulations being introduced in Europe, requiring all merchants and payment services providers to introduce multi-factor authentication (MFA) of the payer.
The compromise of an individual’s data is one of the key threats to the success of e-commerce
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Issue 20 | TheFintechMagazine
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