Risk Management Overview
Capability Overview
To help manage shopper experience as well as payment risk, Amazon offers varying levels of protection to managed fraud and abuse in your Just Walk Out store.All stores leverage standard credit card validations via the card readers, to verify card validity and pre-authorization availability. Beyond this baseline check, depending on payment processor and who is responsible for payment orchestration (Amazon or you), customers can configure an additional layer of fraud and abuse protection via programmatic interfaces, across two key areas: Outstanding Balance Management and Shopper Risk Profile.
Outstanding Balance Management
This represents the shoppers outstanding balance with your stores. It is generally zero, however, on occasion a shopper may have had a declined transaction which would result in a positive outstanding balance.You can use this additional layer of data to deny a shopper entry to your store until the outstanding balance is resolved or another payment mechanism is utilized. For stores where Amazon manages the payment orchestration, this check is automatically enabled and utilized as a secondary check at the gate to limit repeat offenders and minimize store losses.
When you elect to manage payment orchestration, you have options to leverage Amazon capabilities or bring your own. The following outlines the options:
Leverage Amazon capabilities
What you need to do:
- Implement the Feedback API to share payment outcome data with Amazon
- Amazon will track outstanding debt on your behalf
Best for: Merchants who want Amazon's debt tracking capabilities
Bring your own capabilities
What you need to do:
- Build and maintain your own outstanding balance database
- Develop and implement the Fraud and Abuse API
- Create a solution to track and remediate outstanding balance
- Integrate this solution into your Just Walk Out implementation
Best for: Merchants who want complete control over debt tracking and have development resources available.
No Outstanding Balance Checks
What you need to do:
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Select "None" as your strategy
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Trade-off: No protection against repeat offenders with outstanding balances.
Best for: Merchants who handle debt management through other mechanisms or accept the risk.
Shopper Risk Profile
A shopper risk profile leverages Amazons risk model which encompass data elements from many source culminating in a High/Low risk score. Note: This option is available when Amazon is the payment processor or WorldPay. This can act as a third layer of protection allow you to assign higher pre-auth amounts for High Risk shoppers to help mitigate non payment risk.
How it works:
- Amazon provides a recommended risk profile to your Fraud and Abuse connector
- You can use that data to inform the gate action, override the amount to charge, deny entry or accept the recommendation. This allows you to control the level of risk for your store.
What you need to do:
- Build the Fraud and Abuse API to receive Amazon recommendations
- Implement a decision mechanism to either accept or override recommendations
- Define your override criteria and business rules
Best for: Merchants who want data-driven recommendations but need flexibility for special circumstances or business-specific rules.
Implementation Steps
- Identify your payment processing model (Amazon-managed vs. merchant-managed)
- Determine your risk tolerance for outstanding balances
- Assess your development resources for API implementation
- Select the approach that aligns with your operational model
- Set your pre-auth amount
- Configure your fraud and abuse management strategy
- Configure fraud and abuse feedback API when applicable
- Test your solution
