How CIAM Helps in Preventing Abandoned Carts

How can customer identity and access management (CIAM) help prevent abandoned carts? What capabilities can it offer to protect your customers’ data? 

According to the PYMNTS’ May 2021 Securing eCommerce study, found that 65 percent of customers “are likely to terminate their relationships with merchants after experiencing even a single instance of data theft or payment fraud.” The study goes on to outline the expectation of customers that businesses will keep their data private, and a failure to do so is enough to drive customers to competitors. 

In fact, this study actually supports an earlier yet similar study conducted by Ping Identity. In that study, 81 percent of consumers said they would stop engaging with a brand online after a data breach. Further, 63 percent of consumers in that study believe companies are responsible for protecting their data, which the PYMNTS study confirms. 

Both studies reveal what happens when customers feel that their data is no longer safe with an online vendor or retailer: they leave their carts behind and seek out a new eCommerce option. If your enterprise doesn’t get its cybersecurity in order, you could face a sea of abandoned carts in your network. 

CIAM can help prevent abandoned carts. Here’s how.

CIAM and Preventing Abandoned Carts

CIAM Offers Data Storage

Every identity needs proper storage so that hackers can’t exploit the sensitive information they contain. 

Further, CIAM solutions can help you collect data even beyond what they fill out on their registration forms; for starters, you can collect information on their buying habits and areas of purchasing interest. Obviously, you can use this to bolster your targeted marketing campaigns and other ventures. 

However, CIAM benefits don’t just include storing and collecting customer data but securing it as well. In fact, CIAM solutions can help tokenize customer identities so they remain disconnected from sensitive data while in storage. Additionally, these solutions can deploy data encryption and hashing to ensure private information and credentials remain private. 

Perhaps most crucially, CIAM benefits include the ability to maintain visibility over the data you collect. That way, you can monitor what data you collect, how you collect it, and whether you have the right to it; all of this information proves crucial to fulfilling compliance mandates like GDPR.      

Authentication Can Balanced Security and UX

The best way to secure customers against data breaches and thus prevent abandoned carts? Strong authentication protocols, specifically multifactor authentication (MFA). Multifactor authentication simply makes passwords one part of the authentication equation; consumers just need to provide a few more factors to ensure they are who they say they are. In fact, they don’t even need to actively present some factors. Logging in from a recognized endpoint at a normal time could provide enough authentication information for a consumer login. 

Additionally, you could use customers’ mobile devices as part of the authentication process, sending them a simple yes or no question asking if they are attempting to log in at this time. These factors only take a moment and don’t disrupt the customer user experience. Thus CIAM can balance smooth user experiences (another factor in continued shopping) and security, thus avoiding abandoned carts. 

Moreover, because CIAM limits customer access, you can embrace more streamlined authentication with social media sign-in while still maintaining strong identity management. This enables users to use their social media logins as a means to connect with your business; while unthinkable for employees, this can be used to great success in CIAM. 

The combination of these two factors makes CIAM an essential cybersecurity platform for any B2C enterprise. For more about this, check out the Identity Management Buyer’s Guide or the Solutions Suggestion Engine.