Any way to actually prevent fraud orders instead of just flagging them after the fact?

Technical Q&A
1

Shopify’s Fraud prevention app is worthless. It does not actually “prevent” anything. It runs some filters to help identify orders that may be fraudulent AFTER they are placed. Thus, you will incur the credit card fees which the original poster is complaining about.

I just had a “customer” from Miami try 19 different credit cards unsuccessfully before finally getting one to work. Now I get to cancel the order and eat $40 in credit card fees on a $900 transaction. How this system allows that many failed attempts before automatically blocking the IP or something is beyond me. Shopify clearly doesn’t care or they would put more effort and thought into that app.

Anyways, enough ranting. Anyone know of a way to prevent this kind of stuff?

2

I don’t know how you could prevent fraud orders before they are placed, but if you want to prevent accepting the charge until you inspect the order, you could change the payment settings in Shopify to manually capture payment.

So with that the orders would come in, and if they look good then you would capture the payment.

I agree it sucks paying the fees still on refunding, when I owned a store I just chalked the occasional fraud issue up as part of doing business online, work it into your pricing, and when an order looks suspicious (or is high risk) then have support reach out to the customer to investigate and determine if it sounds legit or not.