Help with Endless Fraudulent Orders - $0 Add-on Items

[gratefulglass]

Hi, 

So recently my site has been getting slammed with tons of bogus orders! These orders are all for zero dollar add-on items that no one should be able to check out with without adding another item that costs something to their cart.

For example, I sell pendants and a customer can choose to add a necklace to wear the pendant on that is free or they can upgrade to a silver or gold necklace for a fee. I keep getting orders for just the free necklace!! I have another product that is supposed to be hidden as well which is a "collection kit" and is a necessary part of my workflow/shipping flow and that too is a free product. Both the collection kit and necklace have product pages that are essentially blank, meaning there is no "add to cart" button, but somehow I am still receiving orders for these free items!

I use Sales Motivator and Product Options to integrate these free add ons into my site. Both apps are by Shop Circle, previously Bold. I haven't dealt with this problem up until this year and all of a sudden, its been a major headache! I have reached out to the app developer, but Im wondering if anyone else has dealt with this before and know how I can stop it from happening!!

I should add that I am already using Shopify Fraud Filter and I have payment processing set to manual capture so I can review each order individually. I looked at an analytics report from Shopify this morning and it appears these items are somehow being adding on the cart page itself. I dont even know how that is possible. I've reached out to Shopify customer service and they have not been of much help. Any insight would be much appreciated! 🙏

[JoesIdeas]

Couple ideas:

- Edit your shipping options to require a minimum price (Settings > Shipping and delivery), then they wouldn't be able to finish checkout

- Put some code to check the cart before allowing to go to checkout, and deny navigating to checkout if cart is 0. This would go anywhere someone could navigate to checkout (on the cart page, on a popup or slide out after adding to cart, etc).

- Check your Google Analytics to see where those purchases are happening on your website, then plug that hole (see previous point)

- Automatically fulfill orders for $0 (you can use Order Automator to automate tasks like this if you don't yet have an automation tool) and add some code in the notification (if order total = 0, then show a text box in the order confirmation saying the order is closed) to tell the customer that the order has been marked for close, because it's "against our terms of service to receive a free product without making a purchase" (then add that statement to your TOS).

Hope 1 of those can help you solve that problem. 👍

[gratefulglass]

Thanks! Yeah, it seems like having a developer put some code on the cart page to automatically deny navigating to the checkout page would be ideal, but thats not something I can do on my own. It dawned on me that I offer free shipping by default for all orders.... so I went into my Shipping Settings yesterday and changed the minimum amount required for free shipping to my least expensive product (it was previously set to $0). I then added a second condition for orders that are $0 to charge $99999 for shipping! It's still a bit early to know how effective it will be, but so far so good 🙂 Appreciate your advice, thanks again!

[echinacea26]

tried the shipping settings.  It will only work if your product is a shippable one.  Won't work as an add-on that is a descriptor - such as a color or style variation. 

[echinacea26]

What I implemented today. 

1. Set those add on products as $.01 each.  That should eliminate most of the bots scanning for $0 items to purchase.  
2.  If an order is below my minimum order threshold then it automatically cancels.  Updated terms of service. 
3. I tagged all the bot accounts as fraudulent.  If they attempt to order again then I set a flow to automatically cancel them. 

[HayleyGA]

We are having a similar issue. Will look to use some of the solutions here (we've also put in a flow that cancels all $0 orders) Have you been able to figure out how customers were accessing your $0 GWPs even though they're hidden and have no PDPs?

[gratefulglass]

Im not sure how they were accessing the hidden products or even managing to checkout without an "add to cart" button for said products, that's well beyond my pay grade ha! I will say that after adjusting my shipping settings for $0 orders, these bogus orders have come to a complete halt. I'm hoping it stays that way!! 🤞 Good luck!!

[EasifyApps]

Hi @gratefulglass,

Here's another straightforward solution for you to consider: Firstly, you can add the Pendant as an optional custom option (add-on product) for the main Necklace product. Secondly, include the Necklace product as a required option for purchasing the Pendant, ensuring customers can't snag the free pendant without purchasing the necklace. Additionally, you can hide the pendant product from your website search using the seo.hidden metafield. 

[tacticalflow]

12/8/2024
Yo Shopify!!!!
FIX IT AND REPORT HERE!!!

Guyscand gals. This is an extraordinary failure on the part of Shopify as much as I don’t like WordPress I have to say Woo Commerce would NEVER  let this happen..

This is very disappointing that Shopify hasn’t proactively fixED this.

It is not the fault of the programmers is the fault of the management because the programmers can easily do it. It is THE management that does not let them do their work or even know how to direct them to do that work.

 Shopify time to put on your big boy pants and fix this simple fix.

PLEASE ADVISE. When you let your programmers do their job.

[jerihart]

Shopify has been literally no help with this, and I'm wasting a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop a dozen or more bogus orders every day.  I would have hoped Shopify would find a way to fix this, but no luck.

We have pages of our work to show as examples.  There is no price and no add to cart button on those pages, yet we have received orders for them every day for a couple of months.

They were all priced at $0, but the price doesn't show, so I just raised the prices to $1000 per item.  It took a couple of hours, but fingers crossed that it works!

[Sylva]

This has just started happening on our store.  I don’t know what the hack is, but we noticed everyone who gets a “free order” has added 25 of each item to their cart.  So they put 25 of almost everything and just pay for shipping.  We’ve caught them all so far and cancelled/refunded but it could be some kind of exploit.  We’re not sure if it’s a Shopify bug or something with our site setup.  

[jerihart]

I actually got one of the scammers to email me.  He told me it is a bot that runs 24/7 and he himself could not take me off the list.  He did tell me that the system he is on will not pay shipping, so one way to fix it is to add 0.01 shipping costs, but you already charge shipping on your items, so perhaps this is a different bot you are dealing with?

The Flow app will work to automatically cancel every order that has a $0 cart, but you still have to go in and delete the orders.  At least you won't end up shipping to someone who paid $0 for product.

[valentinafine]

Did you by any chance find out what the point of these idiotic orders is? We're also having the same influx. Already added a huge shipping fee and they still try every day to checkout. I can see the draft orders daily as abandoned carts, but I can't figure out what their actual point of doing this is. Seems like a waste of time, not like anyone will ship anything to them anyway. Just annoying, wish shopify would so something useful for once and fix this. For us they are bypassing an "enquire" button on our zero price products and add to cart somehow.

[jerihart]

The point is, if you have a separate shipping department that doesn't see the price, they might just go ahead and ship the free item.   The scammers aren't actually doing any work, they just have a bot running around that orders anything with a $0 price and no shipping fee.  We have always offered free shipping, but the only real work-around, without completely ruining the look of our site, I have found is to start charging shipping fees.  It's less than our actual cost, but it keeps the bot from placing the orders.

[Elizabeth007]

The Kendra Shield will cancel the orders so you never have to deal with it. It's free for up to 5 rules. This is working for me so far but has not stoped the $0 orders, they just get automatically canceled. I will try the shipping rule today where any  amount of sale set under $5 has $9999 shipping cost lol

[pearlsofjoy]

This is a joke... At the very least we should be able to ban IPs. I have the same customers ordering day after day the same $0 add on.

But it sounds like they're using some bot or software to do this, you'd think a decent developer could fix this exploit in an afternoon.