Shipping Restrictions and Fraud and Porch Piracy

[Henrykjr]

Hey Folks,

I am getting ready to open up my shopify store and begin winding down Ebay sales for many obvious reasons.

During the last 3 years I have seen package theft from both the USPS and Fex Ex Ground system increase 400%-%500% and most certainly I am dealing with about 4-6 package thefts weekly where tracking shows an item delivered but the recipient is throwing at tantrum.   Ebay protects me though their "Seller Protection" program but once I open the Shopify store I am going to be exposed to a number of credit card chargebacks as a result of both theft and fraud.

Over the weekend I did the deep dive into both crime statistics and my own issues with package theft and amazingly there was a high correlation between zipcodes.

Pulled my last 2000 ebay sales or so and discovered 18% of my overall sales going to zipcodes that have high package theft.

I think my store will do well but also dont want to be dealing with yet another load of customer issues.....but then again 18% is a faily large chunk of business to loose.

In my store setup.....I have required an account to shop, put a 21 year old age limit on the store and will ship most items signature required.

Who else is dealing with this issue and what advice can you give me? I would be blocking 166 3 digit zipcode prefixes.

Thoughts?

HK

[bobbymackinnon]

Hey Henry. We used to deal w/ this issue a lot. So much so that we built our own solution and turned it into an app. Would be happy to discuss with you, but the truth is it's incredibly complicated because there are mostly crimes of opportunity so zip isn't an efficient way of filtering out the bad actors without penalizing legitimate buyers. 

https://apps.shopify.com/deliverlitics?st_source=autocomplete