Client who says he never received his purchase, but has never made a purchase on my online store

[WhiteShip]

Hello, I am facing a problem now. I have a clothes store online, until yesterday I never had a problem. All my clients are satisfied. 

But there is a « client » who sent me a message yesterday to tell me that her brother has ordered something on my website 1 week ago and didn’t received anything. I asked for his name, and I found absolutely nothing about his name.

She says that he ordered and received no mail confirmation, but the payment has been done by bank account.

I searched everywhere on the shop for his name, on my bank account, on my emails, on everything, I found NOTHING.

And she says that he took a M size model on April 10th or 11th, and no order correspond to this indication.

So she tell me that with absolutely no proof that he has paid.

Also, the person responses are evasive even I am trying to do my best to help her. She respond very slowly for a person who seems concerned.

So I have a question, is this possible that a bug has occured and an order can be made and nothing happen like this case ?

Or is she trying to scam me or something like that ?

What should I do if she tells me to make a refund ? There is absolutely no evidence from this order.

I am concerned about the fact that she start to lie and tells people on my social media that I have scammed her or something like that.

Thanks by advance for your responses

[Rick]

Hey @WhiteShip 

Thanks for providing such detailed information, it's much appreciated!

I would advise proceeding with caution in this situation, at least for the moment. While it is certainly possible that the person contacting you is a genuine customer and they did pay for an order, it is also possible that this is a deceptive attempt to mislead you which I why I am suggesting caution.

Generally if a customer places an order on your store, you will see a corresponding order in the Orders section of your admin. Sometimes if the customer decides to abort the transaction before finishing, you will see an abandoned checkout relating to it.

What I have seen in the past is if a customer is placing an order on your store and they navigate away from the checkout page too quickly after placing it, the payment can technically go through but the order doesn't get fully registered in the back-end of your store. The customers are meant to see a 'Thank You' page after the order has been placed, however if they clicked checkout and their internet connection dropped for example, it's possible for a glitch like this to happen. 

In your current situation, what I would advise doing is checking to see if any payment has come through yet. After 1 week you would definitely expect to see something by now. You could ask the person messaging you to confirm the method of payment and the total amount paid (with screenshot proof if possible). Then, cross-reference your own payment accounts such as PayPal etc. to see if that amount has actually come through to you. 

If you are 100% sure that the payment was received but the order didn't register in your admin, then you can feel free to create a new order and mark it as paid, then ship it to the customer as normal. If you cannot see any payment in your accounts, and there is no order in your admin, then you can explain this to the customer and ask them to either re-place the order, or speak to their own bank for advice (the charge they are seeing in this instance could be a pre-authorisation that will fall back into their account). 

If you decide to ship the products without first confirming receipt of payment, you run the risk of being deceived. Just so you know, we actually have some helpful information about avoiding fraud on Shopify, here's some resources I would recommend checking out!

• Fraud Prevention
• Fraud Analysis
• Fraud Filter App

[Solochic]

@WhiteShip I just received the same exact email too. Can you please share what you found out from your experience? Thanks!