MyWebConcepts - Prevent Fraudulent Shopify Orders

Protect Yourself From Fraudulent Shopify Orders

Here at MyWebConcepts.com, we often get questions from our clients related to how to protect themselves from fraudulent orders, especially during the holiday season.  These orders are getting more and more difficult to catch, because the hackers are getting more sophisticated. 

However Shopify does have some great fraud detection features that can help safe-guard your store from fraudulent orders. Now add a little common sense and you should be able to determine if an order is fraudulent or not. My dad used to say regarding old prescriptions, "When in Doubt, Throw It Out!" and the same principle applies to suspicious looking orders in Shopify.

So you just received an order on your Shopify store that looks suspicious, what do you do?

  1. Login to Shopify and view the order in question.
  2. Does the value of the order look suspicious? Maybe it's much large than your average order in value?
  3. In the right-hand margin on the order screen, you will see a "Fraud Analysis"  tile. It will have a sliding gauge on the top of the tile indicating the Fraud Analysis level. If it says High, proceed with caution.
  4. In the Fraud Analysis tile click "View Full Analysis"
  5. You will see the name and email of the person that placed the order. Do a Google search for both and see if any negative information turns up on Google for those two items. 
  6. Next, look at the Indicators to see which indicator shows with a red dot next to it on the left side of the line item. Things to look at here are the billing address and billing zip code of the credit card use to place the order. Also check to see if the CCV number matches.
  7. Check the billing and shipping information in the Indicators, are they marked in red too? If so, that information is suspicious as well.
  8. Finally, go to a website like WhatIsMyIPAddress.com. Select IP Lookup, grab the IP address from the bottom of the indicator screen in Shopify and plug it into the field on WHatIsMyIPAddress.com to check the IP.  Does it look like the IP Address is the same address or city that the order was placed from? If not, that is suspicious also, but sometimes people make a purchase from another location, for example while on vacation, so it may in fact be valid.

The final decision whether or not to fulfill the order is yours alone. After looking at all of the pertinent information about the purchaser you will need to make that decision. If something doesn't seem right, cancel the order. 

When in Doubt, Throw It Out!

Rich Petrelli

MyWebConcepts.com

Founder

 

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