Kogan.com Boosts Order Approvals and CX via Riskified Partnership

What happened

Australian online retailer Kogan.com has announced a partnership with fraud-prevention platform Riskified, crediting the collaboration with measurably higher order approval rates and a smoother checkout experience for its customers. The integration centres on Riskified's machine-learning-driven decisioning engine, which assesses transaction risk in real time and allows Kogan to approve a greater share of legitimate orders that legacy rule-based systems would have declined.

Under the arrangement, Riskified assumes chargeback liability on the orders it approves — shifting financial risk away from Kogan while simultaneously reducing the friction that over-cautious fraud filters impose on genuine shoppers. The move is part of Kogan's broader effort to scale its e-commerce operation without a corresponding rise in fraud losses or customer drop-off at the point of payment.

Why it matters

False declines — legitimate purchases rejected by automated fraud screens — are one of the most underappreciated sources of customer attrition in e-commerce. From a behavioural-economics standpoint, the pain of an unexpected rejection at checkout is disproportionately memorable: it erodes trust, triggers loss aversion and, unlike a slow page load, is rarely forgiven or forgotten. Retailers who optimise purely for fraud prevention without accounting for the cost of false positives are, in effect, penalising their best customers.

For service designers, the Kogan–Riskified model illustrates a structural shift: rather than treating fraud controls and customer experience as competing priorities, the two can be decoupled when risk assessment is precise enough. Approval-rate improvement is, at its core, a CX metric — every recovered approval is a customer who completed their intended journey rather than abandoning it in frustration.

By the numbers

• Increased approval rates on legitimate orders reported by Kogan following deployment of Riskified's decisioning engine, according to Business Wire.
• 100% chargeback liability for approved orders transferred to Riskified under the guarantee model, removing financial exposure from Kogan's balance sheet.

The Renascence take

Most commentary on this deal will focus on fraud metrics. What it actually represents is a renegotiation of where operational risk sits in the service chain — and that has profound implications for how retailers design the end-to-end purchase experience.

The instinct to tighten fraud rules after a chargeback spike is understandable but behaviorally costly: it punishes the many for the sins of the few. What Kogan has effectively done is purchase permission to be more generous to its customers — and outsourced the anxiety of that generosity to a specialist. Customer-obsessed operators should audit their own decline rates not as a fraud-team KPI but as a customer-experience metric reported at board level. If your fraud stack cannot tell you how many good customers it turned away last quarter, it is not fit for purpose.