Block customer from making a purchase WITHOUT paying for an app?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A merchant seeks to prevent specific customers from completing purchases on their Shopify store based on identifiers like email or address, without incurring app costs.

Core Problem:

  • Shopify Flow allows orders to go through before refunding, which still charges transaction fees to the merchant
  • The merchant does not have Shopify Plus, limiting available solutions

Suggested Workarounds:

  • Require customer accounts at checkout, then use Flow to automatically delete flagged customer accounts upon creation
  • Change payment capture settings from “Automatically at checkout” to “Automatically when order is fulfilled” or “Manual” — this allows order cancellation before payment processing, potentially avoiding transaction fees

Status:
The discussion remains open with the merchant seeking clarification on implementation details for the proposed solutions, particularly around shipping rules and account-based blocking methods.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I am trying to find a way to block a customer from placing an order based on email, address, etc.

The Flow app won’t work because it allows the customer to purchase, but then refunds them. This costs us money as we still have to pay the fees for the transaction.

How can we stop certain customers from being able to purchase from our store without having to pay for an app? This seems like it should be simple but I cannot find a way to do this.

2

I don’t have plus so 1 and 5 won’t work, and 4 still means I’m charged processing fees.

I tried looking into 3 but I can’t find where to add shipping rules? And for 2 could you maybe elaborate how that works? I’m happy to try it I just need to understand a bit better!

3

Have you tried this?

Require customer accounts to checkout and then have a flow triggered by “Create customer” → Check conditions → “Delete customer”

Also, you can change when payment is captured from “Automatically at checkout” to, say “Automatically when order is fulfilled”/“Manual” – this way you should be able to cancel the order without refunds/transaction fees. (https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/payment-authorization)