Reviewed by Mayer Hyman, Payments Specialist | Reviewed for accuracy July 2026
Key Takeaways
- A wave of high-profile layoffs doesn’t mean the talent pool is drying up. It means more experienced people are available for smaller companies willing to offer flexibility and real impact.
- Merchants identify roughly 45% of their chargebacks as fraudulent, including “friendly fraud,” and global chargeback costs are projected to climb toward $42 billion by 2028 (Mastercard, Datos Insights).
- Insider threats, whether accidental or malicious, remain a leading cause of data breaches, making ongoing employee security training as important as any software investment.
- Centralizing business data through ERP systems continues to pay off for companies of every size, not just large enterprises.
Facing Down Challenges While Building Real Opportunity
The businesses that come out ahead in 2023 are the ones that turn talent shortages, chargebacks, security risk, and data silos into opportunities, by staying proactive and planning ahead while there’s still time to prepare. Behind the headlines about layoffs, supply chain problems, IT security risks, and uneven sales, there’s plenty to be positive about for companies willing to adapt.
Talent: Grab Smart Hires Now
Tech-sector layoffs are creating a larger pool of experienced talent that smaller businesses can now afford to hire. These headline-grabbing cuts are, in part, a herd-mentality reaction to overenthusiastic hiring in prior years, not necessarily a sign of broader economic collapse.
For smaller businesses, the upside is a larger pool of talent available to help with a persistent recruiting problem: the ongoing skills shortage. Many experienced professionals who’ve been through a layoff at a large company are happy to work for smaller firms where they can make an outsized impact and add real value.
With hybrid and remote work now firmly established rather than a passing trend, companies can draw on talent from across the country and beyond by offering a little flexibility. Remote and hybrid arrangements have worked successfully for many businesses and professionals for years now, it’s not a fad or a political football.
You don’t need rockstar talent, although it’s great when available. Adding affordable depth to your teams, people who bring real experience and efficiency, adds momentum to your strategy well beyond the immediate hiring cycle.
Chargebacks: Focus on the Pennies in a Tight Market
Money, whether from investors, financing, or customers, tends to be harder to come by in tighter markets. At times like these, successful businesses focus on the small stuff as well as big-ticket items like new products, marketing, ERP, and IT security.
One area worth watching for retailers and any business running an ecommerce store is chargebacks and friendly fraud. Merchants identify roughly 45% of their chargebacks as fraudulent, a mix of genuine third-party fraud and “friendly fraud” where a legitimate purchase gets disputed anyway, and the total cost of chargebacks to merchants worldwide is projected to keep climbing toward $42 billion by 2028 (Mastercard, 2025 Global Chargebacks Outlook). It’s often easier for a customer and their bank to initiate a chargeback than to resolve a dispute directly, and those costs on what might have started as a small transaction add up quickly across a merchant’s order volume.
Dealing with chargebacks promptly and efficiently through automation saves money and reduces the risk of customer churn, with some estimates for the all-in cost per chargeback (fees, lost merchandise, and administrative time) running well beyond the disputed amount itself. Resolving disputes quickly adds up to meaningful savings over time and reduces the risk of losing otherwise loyal customers.
If it isn’t chargebacks, there are bound to be other areas of your business leaking small sums that could grow into major losses. Through joined-up software like ERP, or just some old-fashioned detective work, find and eliminate them.
Security: Everyone Is at Risk (and Everyone Is a Risk)
IT and data security stays near the top of the agenda for most larger businesses, for good reason: a single breach can mean crippling recovery costs or worse. Any smaller business with teams working on servers or in the cloud faces a similar risk, primarily from the people working there, otherwise known as insider threats.
Whether through mistake, fatigue, or malicious intent, insiders still trigger a large share of data breaches. They might open a malware-laden link or attachment, fall for a phishing attempt, or bring in malware on a personal device. Training every employee on security basics, and deploying modern software to defend against and mitigate attacks, remains a must-have for any business that wants to stay unscathed.
Put All Your Data in One Place
Whatever your business does, it produces data, and much of that data sits isolated, invisible to other teams. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been a boon for companies large and small, making what once lived only in a spreadsheet or a sales list accessible to purchasing, planning, marketing, and other roles and teams.
While most ERP vendors like to highlight their largest clients, in practice it’s the thousands of small businesses they support that get the most value, since ERP adoption is often what pushes a company to genuinely become a digital business. Platforms like Infor CloudSuite serve customers across retail, manufacturing, supply chain, and more.
Companies see real savings from ERP by connecting processes and data that used to live in silos. Modern cloud ERPs can also adapt as a business changes, integrating specialist tools like Cartis’ ecommerce and payment tools as needed.
For any business leader or department manager, it can be tough to know where to look given the pace of change and the noise outside the office door. Paying attention to these trends should put your organization in a stronger position looking ahead. Just remember to look after your people and processes throughout any change you make.
To see how to integrate Cartis products into your own solutions, get in touch.
FAQ
Is the current wave of tech layoffs a sign the job market is collapsing?
Not necessarily. Many high-profile layoffs reflect a correction after prior overhiring rather than a broader collapse, and they often free up experienced talent that smaller companies can hire more easily than before.
How big of a problem is friendly fraud for merchants?
Significant and growing. Merchants attribute roughly 45% of their chargebacks to fraud, including friendly fraud, and the global cost of chargebacks to merchants is projected to reach $42 billion by 2028 (Mastercard, Datos Insights).
Do small businesses really need an ERP system?
Often, yes. While large enterprises get the marketing spotlight, small and mid-sized businesses frequently see the biggest relative gains from ERP adoption, since it’s often the step that turns disconnected spreadsheets and sales lists into a genuinely data-driven operation.
