The Growing Importance of Age Verification for Online Businesses

The global market for e-commerce and online retail businesses is humongous and is growing at an exponential rate every year. According to studies, online sales over e-commerce websites are expected to reach a whopping 4.8 trillion US dollars in the year 2021. Among such a huge market of online retailers, there are definitely those who sell stuff that is often age restrictive. Although there are few if any legal restrictions to selling such stuff online, it is imperative for the businesses to make sure that the person they are selling fulfills their age criteria. In such instances, age verification becomes important for the business. A lot of techniques to verify age can often be fooled. For instance, once a 12-year-old managed to surpass the age verification of a website selling alcohol. Their website called for the verification of an individual’s age through their Facebook profile. The child managed to change his age on his Facebook bio in order to gain access to the website. Similar cases can be seen that have been used to gain access to websites whose content or products are not appropriate for certain age groups. How to Verify Age for an Online Business? Verifying the age of your online users can be tricky. Most of the time the measures you take to confirm the age of the user can be breached easily. So what is it that you can do to make sure that people below a certain age threshold cannot access your website? rnAlthough credit card details are required by online retailers to complete the purchase, however, that too can be obtained by the underage by some means or the other. Asking the user to set up an account may hinder them but does not avert them completely. There has to be one specified fail-safe way for online businesses to verify their customers’ age. rnHere it becomes crucial to mention that there are certain age and ID verification services that can be availed to make sure that your website is secure. They primarily add a verification page to your website wherein before gaining access the user has to scan his/her ID document through their computer or phone camera. The AI-based verification software will scan the date of birth of the individual through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and ascertain whether they are old enough to access the website. Furthermore, you can also add the online facial recognition feature through such services. The facial recognition feature will enable the software to determine whether the person on the ID and the person whose face is being scanned are the same. The online facial recognition tech uses liveness detection and 3D depth perception to weed out any doubts regarding photoshopped images and spoof attacks.