Hunter: Giving chargeback fraud the boot

For many of us, 2020 became the year we re-discovered The Walk. As the world went in and out of lockdowns and our list of permitted activities dwindled, a stroll in the fresh air was a welcome diversion. And for those with dogs or small children, it was a salvation.

Proper walking calls for proper footwear. So it’s hardly surprising that Hunter saw a surge of orders in the second quarter of 2020. In fact, in many ways, Hunter has gone from strength to strength in the past 12 months. This is more than just a flash-in-the-pan. The brand has been around for over 150 years and its success owes a lot to its forward-thinking, agile approach to business and technology.

We sat down with Senior Ecommerce Manager, Bryony Longden, to explore how Hunter used our risk tool, RevenueProtect, to reduce its chargebacks. She also explained how payments has gone from finance tool to conversion-driver. And we learned about the brand’s amazing community response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Bryony: The US and Canada are two of our largest markets and it was there we were seeing a huge rate of fraud. We knew it was coming from specific locations, but we didn’t have any way of dealing with it other than manually going in and blocking IPs and email addresses. And, while we could cancel the order, it was still being made in the first place. During peak periods, we were dealing with literally thousands of manual reviews.

On top of that, our fraud knowledge was scattered across the business. Our finance team had a finance-level of detail, and we had some knowledge in our ecommerce team from a customer service perspective. But we had limited data around risk.

Bryony: When we changed payment providers, we included our risk challenges in the RFP. Adyen proposed a really strongrisk solutionwhich included a concrete plan for getting chargebacks down year-on-year with solid KPIs.

And the results have been amazing. We’ve managed to get our chargeback rate down from 2% to 0.2%, which is a 90% drop overall. At the same time, we’ve managed to keep our authorisation rates high. This is thanks to our agile partnership with Adyen. It’s been two years of constantly tweaking the rules, changing things around, and experimenting with new techniques. Hunter is very open to trying new things. So if anyone has an idea or wants to test something, we’re keen to give it a go. Overall, it’s been a collaborative process, which we love.

Bryony: The main change for us after partnering with Adyen is that we now treat payments as a conversion-driver. This attitude-shift means that payments are now driven by the ecommerce team. As a result, we offer as many relevant payment methods as possible instead of simply favouring those that are cheaper and easy to implement. We promote this breadth of options to customers, utilising that message across the site. The flexibility to be able to switch payment methods on and off as needed has been really positive for us.

When talking to any business these days, it’s impossible not to discuss the pandemic. It’s had such a huge impact across the board. And we’re always looking for examples of brands that have used the crisis as an opportunity to contribute positively to its community.

Bryony: One of the things I’m most proud of during the madness of 2020 was how fast we were to respond to the needs of the community. We set up affiliate health partners almost immediately, donating boots and waterproofs to be used as PPE in hospitals. We provided the UK Ambulance Service with free wellies. We offered a 50% discount to hospitals around the world. And we extended a 30% discount to all healthcare workers in the UK and the US.

We also launched our Pride collection in June and donated proceeds to a COVID fund specifically for the LGBTQ community. And we set upAdyen Givingto go alongside that.

Bryony: Over the last few months, we’ve streamlined our plans, going back to basics in terms of what we sell and how we sell it. In 2021, we’ll be building on our core product offering to include additional categories such as snow and summer items.

A big part of all this is to keep our established territories consistent while growing our emerging markets like Germany and Japan. And of course, we’ll be using digital channels to drive things as much as possible. Over the past year, we have put a lot of effort into building out our CRM data. We will continue building this, and doubling down on customer loyalty.