Dr. Akif Khan,CyberSource's director and the co-author of the report, said that 77% of firms expect to see their e-commerce revenues increase in the year ahead.
"Many of these companies also admitted that they do not expect to increase their spend on e-commerce security to increase in parallel", he told Infosecurity.
The solution to this, he advised, is not to increase the budgets, but for online retailers to make their anti-fraud systems more effective, which can be achieved, he adds, by automating many of the manual intervention procedures.
"With the majority of merchants not allocating any additional budget [to security], businesses should focus on designing sustainable strategies that not only reduce fraud losses, but streamline the entire process", he said.
Dr. Khan's report reveals that the manual review process on card transactions continues to represent a critical area of potential profit leakage.
On average, the report notes, merchants are reviewing 20% of incoming orders. However, 71% of reviewed transactions are ultimately approved, representing significant cost and time inefficiencies.
"To capitalise on the e-commerce opportunity, businesses should focus on streamlining internal fraud management processes", Khan advised. "Improving automated detection and bolstering case management can help reduce the inefficiencies and enable merchants to make more accurate decisions", he added.