Purchases, chargebacks are on the rise.

• Position: Online Shopping

Online shopping now accounts for 51% of all purchases (apart from groceries), and 96% of U.S. consumers have shopped online, according to survey results recently published by UPS and BigCommerce. Chargebacks911, Tampa Bay, Fla., a dispute mitigation and risk management firm, notes that this bodes well for eCommerce merchants and omni-channel retailers, but cautions them to take proactive steps to address the corresponding growth in chargebacks and fraud.

Research from Aite Group, Boston, Mass., predicts that merchants will experience 14,700,000 chargebacks worth an estimated $5,800,000,000 this year. Compared to 2015, those figures represent 17% more disputed transactions and 21% higher losses.

Meanwhile, LexisNexis, New York, reports that fraud attempts and successful fraudulent transactions have more than doubled since 2012, rising from an average of 170 attempts and 80 successes each month to 442 attempts and 206 successes. Those numbers are even higher for merchants operating online. Large multi-channel, eCommerce, and mCommerce retailers average between 707 and 880 fraud attempts each month, with fraudsters succeeding in 432 to 581 cases.

"EMV [Europay, MasterCard, and Visa] technology has thwarted point-of-sale fraud, so fraudsters have simply shifted their attention to the online channel," explains Monica Cardone, cofounder and COO of...