September is the right time to work on your store's trust signals, not November. In the weeks leading up to Black Friday, traffic to online stores rises, but scam attempts rise by a much larger margin, and shoppers know it, they arrive more skeptical than usual.
According to an analysis citing NordVPN and FTC data, fake online stores created specifically for the weeks before Black Friday jumped 250%, often near-identical copies of legitimate stores, and the FTC recorded nearly $435 million in losses from non-delivery online purchase scams alone last year. A Sumsub analysis also found that malicious bot activity doubles or triples during peak days compared to normal traffic, with spikes in checkout fraud and gift-card fraud.
This isn't just a problem for the store, it's also a problem for legitimate stores' buyers, because the same wave of scams makes everyone more cautious, including customers of honest stores. A buyer who's read an article about fake stores impersonating Amazon or eBay arrives on your site with their guard up, and looks for concrete signals before trusting it, not promises.
It's also worth reviewing where checkout abandonment concentrates in your store today, before traffic increases: if the issue is already trust-related in the off-season, it gets amplified during peak season. We cover this in more depth in how to reduce checkout abandonment caused by trust concerns.
Welo Badge verifies legal identity, site security, and policy transparency before peak season starts, and documents all of it on a public Welo Page linked to the badge, so a skeptical buyer can check instead of just having to trust you. If you want to head into Black Friday with the right signals already in place, you can apply for Welo Badge now.
Rise above the usual.
