How a major commerce platform consolidated its risk stack and cut rule deployment from days to hours
When you power payments and commerce for thousands of small and medium-sized businesses across web, mobile, and in-person channels, risk is never a single problem. It's a constantly shifting set of them. This commerce platform had built a broad merchant base spanning diverse verticals, and with that growth came a need for risk infrastructure that could keep pace.
The challenge: A fragmented risk stack that constrained scale
As the platform grew, its risk and fraud operations became increasingly reliant on a complex web of in-house systems and third-party vendors. Maintaining these systems required a large engineering team (roughly 10-15 engineers) just to keep the existing infrastructure running. Deploying new risk rules required extensive engineering involvement, often taking days from conception to production.
Beyond the operational burden, the company faced an evolving threat landscape. While merchant fraud losses were well-controlled, the team identified a gap in buyer fraud detection. Large enterprise merchants were increasingly asking for seller protection capabilities, the kind of intelligent, automated buyer fraud detection that competitors were already offering.
The existing tooling offered only basic protections: static denylists, rate limiters to combat card testing, and rudimentary bot prevention. It could not detect more nuanced patterns such as manual card testing, VPN or proxy usage, mismatched device and shipping signals, or behavioral anomalies at checkout.
The company needed a solution that could support a smarter, more modular approach to risk, one that would reduce engineering overhead, enable faster rule iteration, and lay the groundwork for next-generation buyer fraud detection.
Why this commerce platform chose Sardine
During evaluation, Sardine stood out for its modular, unified platform that could consolidate multiple risk functions, including transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, and payment risk assessment, into a single solution. This meant fewer vendors, less complexity, and a more coherent data foundation for decision-making.
Sardine's no-code rule engine was a particular differentiator. The risk analytics team could write, test, and deploy rules independently, without waiting on engineering resources. That shift, from engineering-dependent to analyst-driven, was a fundamental change in how the risk function could operate.
Sardine also integrated cleanly with existing vendor relationships, centralizing data from third-party tools to support more effective and informed decisioning. And beyond the platform itself, the Sardine team was seen as a collaborative, execution-focused partner that was easy to work with and committed to delivering on time.
The solution: A unified platform for transaction monitoring and buyer fraud detection
The commerce platform deployed Sardine as the core of its risk and fraud workflows, running Sardine's rule engine in tandem with its in-house systems to make merchant fraud decisions. The integration allowed the risk analytics team to write and iterate on rules quickly, without engineering bottlenecks.
With that foundation in place, the team is now extending Sardine into a new use case: buyer fraud detection. The approach centers on integrating Sardine's SDK into the platform's checkout experiences across web and mobile surfaces, an effort currently being scoped with the team, with integration work expected to begin in the coming weeks.
Once live, the SDK will collect device intelligence and behavioral telemetry at the point of purchase, including signals such as device fingerprint, IP address, VPN or proxy indicators, and behavioral patterns, using a session ID as the linking key between front-end data collection and back-end risk evaluation.
At the time of a transaction, the back end will pass that session ID to Sardine, which will run a dedicated checkpoint of buyer fraud rules against the enriched device and behavior data. Flagged transactions will trigger automated actions, including merchant notifications that alert sellers to potentially fraudulent orders before goods or services are shipped, giving merchants the visibility and protection they have been asking for.
The longer-term roadmap includes giving merchants direct control over their protection settings, such as enabling reCAPTCHA or 3DS authentication on high-risk channels, and building out a self-serve dashboard experience similar to what leading competitors offer today.
The results: Risk losses at a five-year low and a platform built for what's next
Since deploying Sardine, the commerce platform has seen its risk losses fall to their lowest point in five years. Rule deployment timelines dropped from days to hours, and the engineering team supporting risk infrastructure was scaled down significantly as the risk analytics team took on greater ownership of rule management.
"We've significantly reduced our reliance on engineering resources and cut rule deployment timelines from days to hours."
Sardine's platform also enabled the company to expand into adjacent use cases. During high-volume sales periods, the team uses Sardine's tooling to assess merchant credit risk, evaluating whether merchants can fulfill large orders. This demonstrates that the platform's value extends well beyond traditional fraud detection.
Building toward intelligent seller protection
The next phase of the partnership is focused on validating a buyer fraud detection capability that meets the expectations of the platform's largest enterprise merchants. By integrating Sardine's SDK across checkout surfaces and running buyer-specific rules against enriched device and behavioral signals, the team will measure true positive rates and minimize false positives before rolling the capability out more broadly.
If validated, the program will expand to include merchant-facing controls, giving sellers the ability to configure their own protection preferences. This would be a meaningful step toward a differentiated, market-leading seller protection offering.
"Sardine's platform is now the core of our risk and fraud workflows, enabling us to consolidate vendors and focus on scaling our business."
The takeaway: Consolidation, speed, and the right partner
For companies managing complex, multi-vendor risk stacks, this platform's experience offers a clear lesson: consolidation creates leverage. Bringing transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, and risk assessment onto a single platform reduced operational complexity, freed up engineering resources, and created a better foundation for data-driven decisioning.
Combined with Sardine's no-code rule engine and collaborative team, the commerce platform transformed its risk function from a reactive, engineering-heavy operation into a proactive, analyst-driven capability, one now positioned to power the next generation of seller protection at scale.