Case Study
A Fashion eCommerce Leader Cuts RTO Losses with 67% Precision
A Fashion eCommerce Leader Cuts RTO Losses with 67% Precision
A Fashion eCommerce Leader Cuts RTO Losses with 67% Precision
Client
A fast-growing eCommerce platform
Challenges
High RTO rates impacting margins, especially from COD orders
Solution
Bureau’s RTO Prediction Suite powered by device intelligence and risk banding
Demonstrated Results
29% potential RTOs predicted before shipping
67%+ precision across all platforms
$82.8K recovered in cost savings over three months
RTO rate reduced from 18.1% to 11.2%
Introduction
Bureau’s Device ID solution helped predict and prevent nearly half of all potential RTOs (return to origin), saving logistics costs, safeguarding COD revenue, and enabling smarter interventions across platforms.
The Challenge
Tackling a Persistent Cost Sink - RTO
Return to Origin (RTO) had become a major operational and financial drain for the company. A significant number of cash-on-delivery (COD) orders were either undelivered or rejected at the doorstep, leading to:
Nearly $2 loss per RTO order due to reverse logistics
Increased warehousing overhead from returned inventory
Blocked inventory cycles delaying resale
Rising customer service costs to handle complaints
The problem was especially acute on platforms like browser and Android, where traditional order-level data failed to flag high-risk behavior early enough.
Despite using basic fraud filters, the company struggled to spot users exploiting the COD model. These users often placed orders from:
Fresh browser sessions or incognito mode
Reset or rooted devices with no prior history
Spoofed geolocations and dynamic IPs
Because they looked like new, clean customers, these users bypassed existing defenses. The company lacked device- and session-level intelligence to distinguish between true first-time users and bad actors. The result: rising RTO rates, margin leakage, and missed opportunities for smarter risk-based decisioning.
The Solution
RTO Risk Scoring Powered by Device Intelligence
The e-commerce platform partnered with Bureau to proactively reduce RTO-related losses by flagging high-risk orders before dispatch. Rather than relying solely on order-level attributes like address quality, payment mode, or customer history, Bureau’s approach layered in device intelligence, enabling risk decisions to be made at the very point of order placement.
Bureau’s platform analyzed over 160 passive signals from a user’s device, environment, and behavior, such as:
Spoofed geolocation and language settings
Usage of incognito mode, emulators, or virtual machines
Device reuse across multiple accounts (e.g., single device placing orders from multiple user profiles)
Fresh installs, cloned browsers, and session tampering
Abnormal behavioral indicators—like erratic scrolling or click-through behavior inconsistent with genuine shopping patterns
These signals were then processed through Bureau’s ML-driven risk engine to generate a probability band score for every user session, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. Higher bands indicated higher RTO likelihood.
With this scoring system in place, the eCommerce company could dynamically orchestrate interventions across three tiers:
Prevention: Orders in the highest-risk band (0.91–1.0) were blocked or nudged toward prepaid payment methods, reducing exposure to COD-linked RTOs.
Frictionless Routing: Medium-risk segments (e.g., 0.71–0.9) were treated with soft friction, such as one-click prepaid discounts, address revalidation prompts, or delivery slot confirmation, designed to recover genuine intent while filtering out casual abuse.
Let Through: Low-risk bands (e.g., <0.4) were fast-tracked with no additional friction, maintaining a seamless user experience for trustworthy customers.
The phased rollout allowed the business to calibrate these interventions month-over-month, starting with the riskiest band in Month 1 and progressively expanding to lower bands based on impact. Bureau’s team worked closely with the client to validate model performance, monitor precision metrics, and identify profitability tipping points.
This tiered, data-driven approach helped the company reduce RTO without compromising conversions, ultimately maximizing delivery efficiency and protecting margins on high-cost COD orders.
The Bureau Impact
Real-world Impact and Measurable Uplift
By progressively expanding the intervention bands, the company reduced RTO rate from 18.1% to 11.2%, all while ensuring genuine customers were not alienated.
Business Outcomes:
29% of potential RTOs flagged before shipping
67% precision, minimizing false positives
Platform-specific optimization:
Android: 98%
iOS: 97%
Browser: 99.7%
Month-Wise Profitability from Targeted Interventions:
Month 1: $16K profit from blocking top 1 risk band
Month 2: $31.5K profit by expanding to top 2 bands
Month 3: $35.3K profit by blocking top 3 bands
The Bureau Advantage: Unified Intelligence
Bureau is a unified risk decisioning platform that transforms fragmented identity and fraud management into a single, intelligent infrastructure layer. Unlike traditional point solutions that operate in silos, Bureau’s platform consolidates identity verification, behavioral analytics, device intelligence, and transaction monitoring into one coherent system.
Core Capabilities
Device Intelligence: Identifies trusted devices with real-time risk analysis against 160+ signals like rooted devices, emulator usage, and spoofed environments.
Behavioral Biometrics: Profiles user behavior to instantly flag anomalies bots, impersonation, session hijacking, and more.
Graph Analysis: Maps interconnected users, devices, and IPs to unearth fraud rings and collusion at scale
Identity Verification: Performs seamless identity and liveness checks for onboarding
Contextual Decisioning: Dynamically adapts authentication and access based on contextual risk levels.
Bureau’s unified risk decisioning platform helps marketplaces expand to new geographical locations with confidence while ensuring local, regional, and global compliance
Conclusion
Partnering with Bureau, the eCommerce platform turned RTO from a major cost sink into a profitability lever. The company enhanced its capabilities to predict and prevent potential COD returns with 67% precision. This is enabling the company to not only safeguard revenue but also drive operational efficiency, resulting in fewer losses, stronger trust, and faster growth.
About Bureau
Bureau is a unified risk decisioning platform for digital user journeys that helps digital businesses verify users, detect fraud, and secure trust in real time. Trusted by 200+ global companies across financial institutions, fintechs, digital marketplaces, and consumer internet companies, Bureau powers safer, smarter digital ecosystems across the world.
The Challenge
Tackling a Persistent Cost Sink - RTO
Return to Origin (RTO) had become a major operational and financial drain for the company. A significant number of cash-on-delivery (COD) orders were either undelivered or rejected at the doorstep, leading to:
Nearly $2 loss per RTO order due to reverse logistics
Increased warehousing overhead from returned inventory
Blocked inventory cycles delaying resale
Rising customer service costs to handle complaints
The problem was especially acute on platforms like browser and Android, where traditional order-level data failed to flag high-risk behavior early enough.
Despite using basic fraud filters, the company struggled to spot users exploiting the COD model. These users often placed orders from:
Fresh browser sessions or incognito mode
Reset or rooted devices with no prior history
Spoofed geolocations and dynamic IPs
Because they looked like new, clean customers, these users bypassed existing defenses. The company lacked device- and session-level intelligence to distinguish between true first-time users and bad actors. The result: rising RTO rates, margin leakage, and missed opportunities for smarter risk-based decisioning.
The Challenge
Tackling a Persistent Cost Sink - RTO
Return to Origin (RTO) had become a major operational and financial drain for the company. A significant number of cash-on-delivery (COD) orders were either undelivered or rejected at the doorstep, leading to:
Nearly $2 loss per RTO order due to reverse logistics
Increased warehousing overhead from returned inventory
Blocked inventory cycles delaying resale
Rising customer service costs to handle complaints
The problem was especially acute on platforms like browser and Android, where traditional order-level data failed to flag high-risk behavior early enough.
Despite using basic fraud filters, the company struggled to spot users exploiting the COD model. These users often placed orders from:
Fresh browser sessions or incognito mode
Reset or rooted devices with no prior history
Spoofed geolocations and dynamic IPs
Because they looked like new, clean customers, these users bypassed existing defenses. The company lacked device- and session-level intelligence to distinguish between true first-time users and bad actors. The result: rising RTO rates, margin leakage, and missed opportunities for smarter risk-based decisioning.
The Solution
RTO Risk Scoring Powered by Device Intelligence
The e-commerce platform partnered with Bureau to proactively reduce RTO-related losses by flagging high-risk orders before dispatch. Rather than relying solely on order-level attributes like address quality, payment mode, or customer history, Bureau’s approach layered in device intelligence, enabling risk decisions to be made at the very point of order placement.
Bureau’s platform analyzed over 160 passive signals from a user’s device, environment, and behavior, such as:
Spoofed geolocation and language settings
Usage of incognito mode, emulators, or virtual machines
Device reuse across multiple accounts (e.g., single device placing orders from multiple user profiles)
Fresh installs, cloned browsers, and session tampering
Abnormal behavioral indicators—like erratic scrolling or click-through behavior inconsistent with genuine shopping patterns
These signals were then processed through Bureau’s ML-driven risk engine to generate a probability band score for every user session, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. Higher bands indicated higher RTO likelihood.
With this scoring system in place, the eCommerce company could dynamically orchestrate interventions across three tiers:
Prevention: Orders in the highest-risk band (0.91–1.0) were blocked or nudged toward prepaid payment methods, reducing exposure to COD-linked RTOs.
Frictionless Routing: Medium-risk segments (e.g., 0.71–0.9) were treated with soft friction, such as one-click prepaid discounts, address revalidation prompts, or delivery slot confirmation, designed to recover genuine intent while filtering out casual abuse.
Let Through: Low-risk bands (e.g., <0.4) were fast-tracked with no additional friction, maintaining a seamless user experience for trustworthy customers.
The phased rollout allowed the business to calibrate these interventions month-over-month, starting with the riskiest band in Month 1 and progressively expanding to lower bands based on impact. Bureau’s team worked closely with the client to validate model performance, monitor precision metrics, and identify profitability tipping points.
This tiered, data-driven approach helped the company reduce RTO without compromising conversions, ultimately maximizing delivery efficiency and protecting margins on high-cost COD orders.
The Solution
RTO Risk Scoring Powered by Device Intelligence
The e-commerce platform partnered with Bureau to proactively reduce RTO-related losses by flagging high-risk orders before dispatch. Rather than relying solely on order-level attributes like address quality, payment mode, or customer history, Bureau’s approach layered in device intelligence, enabling risk decisions to be made at the very point of order placement.
Bureau’s platform analyzed over 160 passive signals from a user’s device, environment, and behavior, such as:
Spoofed geolocation and language settings
Usage of incognito mode, emulators, or virtual machines
Device reuse across multiple accounts (e.g., single device placing orders from multiple user profiles)
Fresh installs, cloned browsers, and session tampering
Abnormal behavioral indicators—like erratic scrolling or click-through behavior inconsistent with genuine shopping patterns
These signals were then processed through Bureau’s ML-driven risk engine to generate a probability band score for every user session, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. Higher bands indicated higher RTO likelihood.
With this scoring system in place, the eCommerce company could dynamically orchestrate interventions across three tiers:
Prevention: Orders in the highest-risk band (0.91–1.0) were blocked or nudged toward prepaid payment methods, reducing exposure to COD-linked RTOs.
Frictionless Routing: Medium-risk segments (e.g., 0.71–0.9) were treated with soft friction, such as one-click prepaid discounts, address revalidation prompts, or delivery slot confirmation, designed to recover genuine intent while filtering out casual abuse.
Let Through: Low-risk bands (e.g., <0.4) were fast-tracked with no additional friction, maintaining a seamless user experience for trustworthy customers.
The phased rollout allowed the business to calibrate these interventions month-over-month, starting with the riskiest band in Month 1 and progressively expanding to lower bands based on impact. Bureau’s team worked closely with the client to validate model performance, monitor precision metrics, and identify profitability tipping points.
This tiered, data-driven approach helped the company reduce RTO without compromising conversions, ultimately maximizing delivery efficiency and protecting margins on high-cost COD orders.
The Bureau Impact
Real-world Impact and Measurable Uplift
By progressively expanding the intervention bands, the company reduced RTO rate from 18.1% to 11.2%, all while ensuring genuine customers were not alienated.
Business Outcomes:
29% of potential RTOs flagged before shipping
67% precision, minimizing false positives
Platform-specific optimization:
Android: 98%
iOS: 97%
Browser: 99.7%
Month-Wise Profitability from Targeted Interventions:
Month 1: $16K profit from blocking top 1 risk band
Month 2: $31.5K profit by expanding to top 2 bands
Month 3: $35.3K profit by blocking top 3 bands
The Bureau Impact
Real-world Impact and Measurable Uplift
By progressively expanding the intervention bands, the company reduced RTO rate from 18.1% to 11.2%, all while ensuring genuine customers were not alienated.
Business Outcomes:
29% of potential RTOs flagged before shipping
67% precision, minimizing false positives
Platform-specific optimization:
Android: 98%
iOS: 97%
Browser: 99.7%
Month-Wise Profitability from Targeted Interventions:
Month 1: $16K profit from blocking top 1 risk band
Month 2: $31.5K profit by expanding to top 2 bands
Month 3: $35.3K profit by blocking top 3 bands
The Bureau Advantage: Unified Intelligence
Bureau is a unified risk decisioning platform that transforms fragmented identity and fraud management into a single, intelligent infrastructure layer. Unlike traditional point solutions that operate in silos, Bureau’s platform consolidates identity verification, behavioral analytics, device intelligence, and transaction monitoring into one coherent system.
Core Capabilities
Device Intelligence: Identifies trusted devices with real-time risk analysis against 160+ signals like rooted devices, emulator usage, and spoofed environments.
Behavioral Biometrics: Profiles user behavior to instantly flag anomalies bots, impersonation, session hijacking, and more.
Graph Analysis: Maps interconnected users, devices, and IPs to unearth fraud rings and collusion at scale
Identity Verification: Performs seamless identity and liveness checks for onboarding
Contextual Decisioning: Dynamically adapts authentication and access based on contextual risk levels.
The Bureau Advantage: Unified Intelligence
Bureau is a unified risk decisioning platform that transforms fragmented identity and fraud management into a single, intelligent infrastructure layer. Unlike traditional point solutions that operate in silos, Bureau’s platform consolidates identity verification, behavioral analytics, device intelligence, and transaction monitoring into one coherent system.
Core Capabilities
Device Intelligence: Identifies trusted devices with real-time risk analysis against 160+ signals like rooted devices, emulator usage, and spoofed environments.
Behavioral Biometrics: Profiles user behavior to instantly flag anomalies bots, impersonation, session hijacking, and more.
Graph Analysis: Maps interconnected users, devices, and IPs to unearth fraud rings and collusion at scale
Identity Verification: Performs seamless identity and liveness checks for onboarding
Contextual Decisioning: Dynamically adapts authentication and access based on contextual risk levels.
Bureau’s unified risk decisioning platform helps marketplaces expand to new geographical locations with confidence while ensuring local, regional, and global compliance
Schedule a Demo
Bureau’s unified risk decisioning platform helps marketplaces expand to new geographical locations with confidence while ensuring local, regional, and global compliance
Schedule a Demo
Bureau’s unified risk decisioning platform helps marketplaces expand to new geographical locations with confidence while ensuring local, regional, and global compliance
Schedule a Demo
Bureau’s unified risk decisioning platform helps marketplaces expand to new geographical locations with confidence while ensuring local, regional, and global compliance
Schedule a Demo
Conclusion
Partnering with Bureau, the eCommerce platform turned RTO from a major cost sink into a profitability lever. The company enhanced its capabilities to predict and prevent potential COD returns with 67% precision. This is enabling the company to not only safeguard revenue but also drive operational efficiency, resulting in fewer losses, stronger trust, and faster growth.
About Bureau
Bureau is a unified risk decisioning platform for digital user journeys that helps digital businesses verify users, detect fraud, and secure trust in real time. Trusted by 200+ global companies across financial institutions, fintechs, digital marketplaces, and consumer internet companies, Bureau powers safer, smarter digital ecosystems across the world.
Conclusion
Partnering with Bureau, the eCommerce platform turned RTO from a major cost sink into a profitability lever. The company enhanced its capabilities to predict and prevent potential COD returns with 67% precision. This is enabling the company to not only safeguard revenue but also drive operational efficiency, resulting in fewer losses, stronger trust, and faster growth.
About Bureau
Bureau is a unified risk decisioning platform for digital user journeys that helps digital businesses verify users, detect fraud, and secure trust in real time. Trusted by 200+ global companies across financial institutions, fintechs, digital marketplaces, and consumer internet companies, Bureau powers safer, smarter digital ecosystems across the world.
Company
Category
Identity Fraud
Compliance
Client
A fast-growing eCommerce platform
Challenges
High RTO rates impacting margins, especially from COD orders
Demonstrated Results
Solution
Bureau’s RTO Prediction Suite powered by device intelligence and risk banding
Demonstrated Results
29% potential RTOs predicted before shipping
67%+ precision across all platforms
$82.8K recovered in cost savings over three months
RTO rate reduced from 18.1% to 11.2%
Client
A fast-growing eCommerce platform
Company
Category
Identity Fraud
Compliance
Challenges
High RTO rates impacting margins, especially from COD orders
Solution
Bureau’s RTO Prediction Suite powered by device intelligence and risk banding
Demonstrated Results
Demonstrated Results
29% potential RTOs predicted before shipping
67%+ precision across all platforms
$82.8K recovered in cost savings over three months
RTO rate reduced from 18.1% to 11.2%
Client
A fast-growing eCommerce platform
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Privacy Policy. Terms of Service.
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Leave behind fragmented tools. Stop fraud rings, cut false declines, and deliver secure digital journeys at scale
Leave behind fragmented tools. Stop fraud rings, cut false declines, and deliver secure digital journeys at scale