Once manual order review becomes a bottleneck or chargebacks are eating into margin, dedicated fraud prevention software can automate the decision in milliseconds. Here's how the main options work and how to choose between them.
What fraud prevention platforms actually do
Tools like Signifyd, Riskified, Kount and Sift sit between your checkout and your order fulfilment process, scoring every transaction in real time using device fingerprinting, behavioural signals, historical fraud databases and machine learning models trained across thousands of merchants. Based on that score, orders are approved automatically, declined automatically, or flagged for manual review, dramatically reducing the volume your team needs to check by hand.
The more advanced platforms, notably Signifyd and Riskified, offer a chargeback guarantee: if they approve an order and it later turns out to be fraudulent, they reimburse you for the loss, effectively shifting fraud risk from you to them in exchange for a fee per transaction.
Comparing the main players for UK retailers
Signifyd is widely used among mid-sized UK retailers on Shopify Plus and BigCommerce, integrates natively with most major platforms, and its guarantee model appeals to merchants who want fraud risk taken off their books entirely. Riskified offers a similar guarantee-based model and is particularly strong for retailers with meaningful cross-border or high-value order volume, though its pricing typically favours larger transaction volumes.
Kount (now part of Equifax) and Sift are more commonly used by mid-market and enterprise retailers wanting granular control over their own rules engine rather than a fully outsourced guarantee, which suits businesses with an in-house risk team. Smaller UK stores often start with the fraud tools built into their payment gateway — Stripe Radar and PayPal's own fraud protection are both capable and included at no extra cost — before graduating to a dedicated platform as volume grows.
Understanding the pricing models
Guarantee-based providers like Signifyd and Riskified typically charge a percentage of gross merchandise value processed through the platform (commonly in the 0.5–1.5% range, negotiated down at higher volumes), which covers both the screening technology and the chargeback reimbursement. Rules-based platforms like Sift or Kount tend to charge per transaction screened or a flat monthly platform fee plus usage, without the reimbursement guarantee — cheaper per order, but you retain the fraud risk yourself.
Balancing fraud capture against false positives
The most damaging mistake in fraud prevention isn't missing a fraudulent order — it's declining a genuine customer's legitimate purchase. Every wrongly declined order is a lost sale and a frustrated customer who may never return, and industry research consistently finds that false declines cost UK retailers more in lost revenue than fraud losses themselves.
Implementation and integration considerations
Most fraud prevention platforms integrate via a plugin or app for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and BigCommerce, typically taking a few hours to a few days to fully configure, including setting your risk tolerance thresholds and connecting your order fulfilment workflow so approved orders ship automatically. Run any new tool in 'shadow mode' — scoring orders without acting on the results — for two to four weeks before switching on automatic declines, so you can validate its accuracy against your own order history before it starts turning away real customers.
Deciding whether you need one at all
As a rough guide, a UK store processing under roughly £30,000–£50,000 a month with a chargeback rate under 0.3% can usually manage with the fraud tools built into Stripe or PayPal and sensible manual review of flagged orders. Above that volume, or once chargeback rates or fraud losses become a measurable drag on margin, the cost of dedicated fraud software is usually justified by the combination of reduced losses, reduced manual review time, and — with a guarantee-based provider — the certainty of a fixed, predictable cost of fraud.
Before signing a contract, ask any shortlisted vendor for references from UK merchants in a similar category and order value bracket, since fraud patterns and false-decline tolerances vary considerably between, say, high-value electronics and lower-value fashion accessories. Trial periods and month-to-month contracts, rather than an immediate annual commitment, let you validate the vendor's real-world performance against your own order book before locking in a longer agreement.
How This Connects to the Rest of Your Operation
It's rarely useful to treat choosing e-Commerce fraud prevention software: signifyd, riskified and the UK alternatives as a standalone decision — the strongest results tend to come from lining it up with the rest of your operation. For a closer look at this, see our guide to E-Commerce Bookkeeping and Accounting Software: What UK Retailers Actually Need.
For related reading: Our companion guide, Customer Support Software for E-Commerce: Zendesk, Gorgias and Freshdesk Compared, goes into this in more depth. It's worth reading this alongside Understanding Product Liability Insurance for UK E-Commerce Sellers before making a final decision.