When the knock-on effects of the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent UK lockdowns are discussed, much of the focus is on the negative impact on the economy, our physical health, and our mental health. But, while the damaging effects are unlike anything we’ve ever witnessed, it’s not all doom and gloom.

While many businesses have suffered as a result of the pandemic, others have flourished. Exercise equipment, homeware, DIY, and gardening retailers, amongst others, were some of the businesses that flourished during the first national lockdown. When it comes to business-to-business, technology providers, ecommerce sites, video conferencing software solutions, and healthcare providers led the way. So did the companies who tapped into their services.

2020 has been a boom year for eCommerce, with average daily transaction volumes equal to 88 percent of the volume achieved during Black Friday weekend 2019 according to digital trust and safety specialist Sift.

It also finds the average attempted fraudulent purchase value has risen to over $700 from October through November 2020, a 70 percent year-on-year increase compared to the same period in 2019.

The Christmas shopping season is in full swing. This year, online retailers pushed the boundaries with "Black November" in the hopes of improving their online sales, thanks to the uncertainty around in-store shopping due to COVID-19, leading many customers to make their purchases from the safety of their own homes.

As a result, e-commerce merchants have witnessed a significant uptick in users and devices connecting to websites than in recent years.

The holiday period is a peak time for eCommerce fraud. And according to research from fraud prevention specialist Datavisor it's on the rise.

Shipping fraud (in which fraudsters divert stolen goods to their own address) in the US increased by 37 percent and billing fraud (in which fraudsters use a victim’s stolen address to purchase goods) increased by 34 percent.

It’s no surprise e-commerce activity is growing at unprecedented rates as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and local governments’ stay-at-home orders. In fact, e-commerce spending came in at $77 billion higher than expected from March-June of 2020.

Despite a push for more sophisticated e-commerce strategies even pre-pandemic, many retailers are hesitant to adopt new technology to manage the growing trend and often lose out on potential avenues of revenue as a result.

As we head towards a COVID Christmas it's likely that many more people will be doing their holiday shopping online.

But while this is good news for online retailers it's also an opportunity for fraudsters. This year has already seen a surge in attacks on eCommerce sites and there are certain to be more to come. We spoke to Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable to find out more about the latest vulnerabilities and how businesses can protect themselves.

The fastest-growing eCommerce companies share a number of key characteristics, among them being able to keep up with technology change, shipping orders in a timely manner, and providing real-time insights on the status of an order.

This is among the findings of a new report from API transformation company Jitterbit, which also shows that as the number of applications requiring integration and the number of integration challenges rises, so does businesses' reliance on integration vendors.

With bricks and mortar stores largely shut down for much of the first half of 2020, it’s no real surprise to find that cybercriminals have been targeting eCommerce sites.

New research from IntSights looks at how there has been a rise in cybercriminals targeting eCommerce sites using a variety of attack methods, such as skimming attacks, account takeovers and ransomware.

Based on a study of 34,000 sites and apps, as well as a survey of over 1,000 consumers conducted in June 2020, new research details how content abuse is a critical part of the fraud supply chain, the interconnected ecosystem of fraud.

The research, carried out by digital trust and safety firm Sift, also uncovered a fraud ring based in Russia where fraudsters executed a card-testing scheme through fake listings on an e-commerce marketplace.

Online fraud has gained in sophistication in recent years. As consumers have moved to using mobile devices and have come to expect a consistent shopping experience across platforms,  so the fraudsters have never been far behind.

We spoke to Michael Reitblat, co-founder and CEO of eCommerce fraud prevention specialist Forter, which recently published its latest Fraud Attack Index, to find out more about the fraud landscape and how businesses can protect themselves.

PayPal has agreed to pay $4 billion to acquire Honey Science Corporation, which is best-known for its reward and deal-finding service and browser add-on.

The acquisition still needs the usual regulatory approval, but the transaction is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2020. The company says that the purchase "will transform the shopping experience for PayPal's consumers while increasing sales and customer engagement for its merchants".

The sophistication level of bots attacking eCommerce sites is on the rise according to a new report from cybersecurity company Imperva.

Traffic to eCommerce sites is made up of 17.7 percent bad bots, 13.1 percent good bots and 69.2 percent humans, the findings show, and the bad bots are getting better -- but not in a good way.

The Magecart JavaScript attack that captures online payment information has been around since 2016. A new study for Arxan Technologies produced by Aite Group takes a detailed look at the attack.

This research follows the trail of servers compromised by Magecart groups, as well as the collection servers to which the sites were actively sending stolen credit card data, in an effort to examine commonalities between victim websites and the tactics, techniques, and procedures used to compromise the servers.

Cloud business system company Zoho is launching two new platforms. Commerce Plus uses Zoho's customer experience, finance, analytics, and intelligence software to provide businesses an interconnected, first-of-its-kind commerce experience platform.

The Zoho Marketing Platform can support over 20 different marketing channels, including websites, social, events, text, email, ads, offline, and more.

Once you sign up for Amazon Prime, it's hard to imagine how you ever lived without it. Well... that might be a slight exaggeration, but it's easy to fall in love with the service. Now Amazon is giving would-be subscribers another reason to sign up, and an added bonus for those who already have.

Amazon Day is a US-only service -- for now, at least -- that gives subscribers the option of consolidating all of their deliveries for the week on a day of their choice.