At EverC, we always welcome opportunities to share knowledge, and if we can do so while sharing the stage with our valued customers, it’s even better! We recently invited Erin Brusseau, Director of Content Moderation for Wish, to join our CEO, Ariel Tiger, to speak at the Marketplace Risk Management Conference in San Francisco. Together, they detailed Wish’s journey from counterfeit problems to continuing success.
Tiger opened the discussion with an analysis of the current state of ecommerce and marketplace risk. “We've seen unprecedented levels of illicit activity all over the Internet. One of the serious problems that marketplaces are facing is counterfeits,” he explained, pointing out the counterfeits as a threat not only to the global economy, but to health and safety in many cases.
Brusseau spoke about how this affected Wish. The ecommerce giant’s counterfeit problem had ballooned to the point where it was having a negative effect on business growth: “We didn’t have customer confidence. And we didn’t have regulator confidence, either,” she said. “We were so engaged in a number of different actions with different regulators trying to resolve them that it started to inhibit our ability to grow and retain customers.”
A clear, quantifiable improvement in reputation and customer experience
Wish implemented MarketView, an innovative, AI-powered solution by EverC, as part of a robust plan to fight counterfeits.
The results have been phenomenal. Wish was able to improve customer satisfaction in a way that significantly impacted their reputation and revenue:
- 36% decrease in refund requests in Q4 2022
- 58% decrease in customer order cancellation rates year over year
- 18% increase in buyer conversion (based on Q1 2023 NPS)
- 10% increase in customer retention (based on Q1 2023 NPS)
Scanning more than 78 million listings with an over 95% precision rate, the EverC solution helped prevent over 242,000 problematic listings from appearing on the Wish platform.
Enhancing relations with brands and regulators
Wish was also able to improve their dealings with merchants, many of whom are luxury brands that had been concerned about the counterfeit problem and its impact on their revenues. “In addition to customer retention, we also have merchant trust. Good merchants don't want to sell on a platform with bad merchants,” Brusseau explained.
And the pièce de resistance? Wish was welcomed back to France, regaining access to one of the most lucrative markets in Europe.
A technology-driven solution is necessary for scalable risk management
Tiger emphasized the importance of technology in fighting counterfeits and other fraudulent activity online: “The core of what we do at EverC is based on technology,” he said. “You’ve got to lean into the future to fight today’s sophisticated fraudsters.” AI and LLM technology help drive informed yet efficient decision-making on risk.
“As an operations professional, the ability to implement a no-code solution makes me incredibly happy because it enables us to manage our resources,” said Brusseau. “It’s very hard to scale fraud operations in a way that’s meaningful and doesn’t take up a lot of time and doesn’t leave a lot on the floor.” With EverC solutions, “We were able to move at scale, reducing our manual costs for fraud prevention by 50%, initially.”
Collaboration and robust data – the keys to success
Making ecommerce safer must be a concerted effort worldwide, says Tiger. “The fraudster is on this platform today, tomorrow it’s on a different platform. Today it’s in this part of the world, tomorrow is in a different location. So, if we unite, we can actually fight fraud in a better manner.” Brusseau agreed, “If we're going to fight fraud, we can't stonewall ourselves in segments where we only build in-house models that never talk to each other and never learn,”
The vast pool of data EverC monitors enables a great deal of learning, according to Brusseau: “We benefit because we get all of the knowledge that EverC gathered from not just the models they’ve developed and built, but trends from other clients, obviously anonymized. We get a huge view into the landscape -- things that I may not have seen on Wish, but they may have seen on other client platforms.”
This learning allows the value of EverC solutions to grow exponentially, says Tiger. “With every client that joins our platform, we become better. We can provide better information, and more knowledge to our clients.” This knowledge empowers EverC and the platforms we support to build a safer ecommerce ecosystem, and a safer world.
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