how to stop fraud orders on Shopify

Phew. It’s been a crazy few months since I started getting fraudulent orders on Shopify. The first order I received was on March 2nd, and within 2.5 month, I had over 200 fraudulent orders 🤯

how i caught the orders

I had someone email me letting me know they didn’t make a purchase from my site. I went to check on my orders and was shocked to see a handful of fraud orders (with the little fraud icon from Shopify). I immediately refunded everyone and started freaking out like how did this happen?!

At the time, I had a filter set up on my email so that I didn’t see order emails come in. I have since removed that so I could keep a better eye on orders.

shopify’s fraud analysis is sh*t

Tell me why Shopify tells you an order is highly suspicious but still lets the order come through? What is the point of fraud analysis if you’re not going to do anything about it?

Tell me why Shopify allows incomplete billing addresses, or ones that don’t match up with the card?!?!

Example:

Adam Adam

000 000

000 000

Germany

….I kid you not I got many orders like that.

paying fees on orders they marked as fraud

The worst part of all of this? Shopify marks an order as fraud then makes you pay the payment processing fee, so when you refund people you lose out on money. This was infuriating to me. Because I didn’t feel like I should be the one punished for letting those orders go through, when Shopify can see that it’s fraudulent.

turning on manual orders

The only solution I’ve found to avoid the fees, but not turn off your website, is to turn on manual orders. Now, this is a frustrating solution because a digital product is no longer an instant download. BUT, since Shopify isn’t accepting the order UNTIL you capture the payment, there won’t be any fees taken out that you’ll owe.

My hope here is that by turning this on, and leaving it on for a while, it’ll annoy the scammers and make them stay away from my site forever. Or, at the very least it’ll give me peace of mind that these orders won’t be getting placed until I check them.

get a fraud blocker app

Listen, after 2 months of checking my website multiple times a day to approve legit orders and cancel fraud orders.. I was fed up. I started looking for a fraud prevention app, and stumbled upon one that sucked (Blockify) and one that is doing the job (Blocky).

Save yourself the headache and just start off using Blocky. VPNs and Web Proxy’s are now blocked on my website regardless which country you’re from, and all non-US countries are blocked in general. Within 4 days of using the app my fraud orders have completely stopped (knock on wood).

I’m more than happy to pay $109 a year to have some peace of mind and not have to spend so much time on my website.

other settings to double check

• enable captcha

• turn password mode on while you work behind the scenes

• require customer accounts to be made when checking out

Shopify has been no help

Every single time I reached out to Shopify, they gave me a copy and pasted response from their help article. And every time I said “I’ve already done that, what else” they had nothing. They could provide no solutions for me. They even told me, “oh yeah I can see you’re getting a lot of fraud orders. I’ll let the internal team know and they’ll reach out to you” ….5 months later and they still never reached out. They’re not going to do anything.