Elephant Report Reveals the Real Reason Global Ecommerce Growth is Stalling-And It's Not Fraud

New research shows how unrecognized customers are being blocked, and what it's costing ecommerce businesses in global markets. 

NEW YORK, June 3, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Everyone in ecommerce knows fraud is a threat. But a new report from Elephant reveals a bigger and often overlooked risk: blocking real customers who can't be recognized.

In Identity Crisis: The Invisible Barrier to Global Ecommerce Growth, Elephant surveyed 1,000 consumers across five key high-growth markets–Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom–and found that nearly 60% had been blocked from completing a purchase in the past six months. Even more striking: 15% of those surveyed experienced failures five or more times.

"We're talking about real people being locked out of global commerce," said Matthew Hertz, CEO of Elephant. "This report sheds light on a massive, overlooked issue: the fact that misrecognition, and not fraud, is the real roadblock to global ecommerce growth."

The report doesn't introduce a new problem, but rather, quantifies one that ecommerce leaders already suspect: many platforms are often turning away who could be their best customers, not out of error, but absence of identity context, coverage, and trust.

Key findings from the report include:

• Nearly 70% of consumers have switched to a competitor due to transaction barriers, a shift that suggests permanent loss of customer lifetime value, not just a single missed sale.
• Over 30% of consumers would increase their purchasing by 50% or more if platforms had better identity recognition and trust, representing billions in recoverable revenue.
• In high-growth markets like Brazil, 1 in 3 consumers are being driven to more adaptive competitors due to rigid or outdated trust models that misinterpret normal buying behavior as risk.

The report notes that the real challenge for ecommerce companies scaling globally isn't fraud, it's visibility. Fraud models are optimized to detect risk, not verify intent. Without a more complete view of a consumer's identity, many platforms default to rejection. And that's costing them real customers, recurring revenue, and long-term growth.

"The companies that are going to win in ecommerce aren't the ones blocking the most fraud, they're the ones recognizing the most customers," said Hertz. "We've got to stop treating invisibility as risk. Most of these people aren't threats. They're just not being seen."

The Identity Crisis report outlines how incomplete identity coverage leads to missed conversions, market drag, and lost customer lifetime value.  It shares what's needed to close the identity gap and why global identity intelligence is essential for any ecommerce company looking to scale in unfamiliar markets.

The full report is available at: https://go.elephant.online/identity-crisis

About Elephant
Elephant is the identity trust solution built for global scale. Powered by the industry's largest network of over 5 billion identities, Elephant delivers real-time trust scores that reduce manual reviews, prevent false declines, and unlock revenue across regions.

Only Elephant provides consistent, high-confidence identity insights anywhere you do business—so you can approve more real users, faster. 

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Bethany Fiveson
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SOURCE Elephant