I am getting many abandoned checkouts from different “people”, all having different and convincing names, however every single email is: mail##@protonmail.com, where ## is some combination of two numbers, eg: mail01@protonmail.com.
Does anyone else experience this? Is there a way to prevent these fake abandoned checkouts?
I have read others dealing with fake abandoned checkouts, however those seem to be from one email address. All of mine are coming from different email addresses of the above formula.
Welcome to the Shopify community and thanks for reaching out!
I understand you’re receiving an influx of abandoned checkouts from different users who use different names and email addresses. This may be a bot / spam causing a high number of abandoned carts.
Bots are able to create multiple customers and abandoned checkouts. Unfortunately, there is no way to completely block all bot traffic or actions on a storefront. However, I’ll share some options that can help minimize the flow of bots in your store.
Once logged into your Shopify admin, head to the Online Store > Preferences > Spam Protection section. You’re able to enable spam protection for the following:
Customer account creation, login and password reset.
Newsletter email address entry and blog comment entry.
A second option is to look into installing apps to help protect your store and checkout from fake accounts and bots. I recommend the app(s): Negate ‑ Bot Protection that includes a 7-day free trial and Shop Protector that includes a 14-day free trial. You can also check out our App Store for additional apps that may interest you.
I’d also like to hear what kind of online business you’ve started, what you’re currently working on and if you need assistance with areas of your store. I’ll be happy to take a look and offer further advice.
When integrating this app you’re able to create specific filters to flag suspicious orders, block known customers and add an additional layer of security to your store.
Below is a list of additional ways Fraud Filter can help protect your business:
Restrict checkout to only certain customers.
Prevent certain customers from ordering.
Prevent customers from a particular referring site from ordering.
Prevent certain brands of credit cards from checking out.
Warn you of potentially fraudulent orders or cancel orders outright.
I recommend checking out our [Fraud Filter resource and FAQ](http://Restrict%20checkout to only certain customers. Prevent certain customers from ordering. Prevent customers from a particular referring site from ordering. Prevent certain brands of credit cards from checking out. Warn you of potentially fraudulent orders or cancel orders outright.) for more information.
Just wanted to let you know that the exact same thing has been happening to us during the entire month of juli (our site is www.jackojuno.com). A bunch of abandoned checkouts with male names (which we thought was strange since our customers are 99% women). We have contacted Shopify Support regarding this and got a similar answer to yours.
Same problem here. The problem at the moment is that the fake traffic messes up my analytics. Is there any way of banning accounts with this protonmail to get into the site?
Welcome to the Shopify community and thanks for joining the thread!
The abandoned checkouts that have been created does sound like it may have been generated by bots. I’m glad you were able to connect with our support team to look closer into the issue.
Thank you for reaching out and joining the thread!
Although there is no way to ban or block all bot traffic, you are able to minimize the number of bots in your store.
As shared in my previous post, to help limit the number of bots you can navigate to the Online Store > Preferences > Spam Protection section of your Shopify admin.
You’re able to enable spam protection for the following:
Customer account creation, login and password reset.
Newsletter email address entry and blog comment entry.
I’ll share a screenshot below of what this looks like within your admin. You’ll want to ensure the two boxes under Spam protection are checked.
H, I have the same problem and ticking the spam filter boxes didn’t help. I haven’t yet tried any of the suggested apps. I kind of think this should be resolved by Shopify and not something that I as a customer with payment plan should have to pay extra for. I mean, adding payed apps for extra functionality is one thing, but paying extra for this kind of thing…?
We appreciate you sharing your feedback on this request. I’ve shared this information with our development team to look into implementing this feature in the future. I recommend keeping our Shopify Changelog on hand to stay up to date on new updates for the platform.
Same thing here. A lot of fake abandoned check-outs. All have similar profiles. The fake customers place hundreds of items into their cart, resulting in hundreds or thousands of dollars at check-out. Also, most email addresses come from free gmail accounts. We have spam protection on account creation, but it does not seem to help as all of these fake accounts have created an account and are signed up for our email list. Does anyone know the reason why these bots would create these fake check-outs? Is this a targeted sabotage by competitors? Any thoughts?
Also, how is Shopify planning to deal with the problem?
I don’t think Shopify plans to do anything. I installed Shop Protector and uninstalled it a couple of hours later. The Shop Protector app did not help in my case. I have over 500 fake abandoned orders created since last night, all using the name ramiro ramiro with IP address 192.241.73.162 and ramiro@gmail.com email address. Hopefully, someone at Shopify looks into this.
Yeah the problem is you would likely need to block the traffic before they even access our sites, something I believe only shopify are able to do and no app could resolve.
What I’m wondering is if google are responsible for a lot of the fake checkouts. My site have normally had about one fake abandoned checkout per week, but yesterday and today I’ve had 5 PER DAY. Only difference is that I installed the google channel yesterday. If google is responsible it would be good bot traffic but it’s still seriously messing with our newly launched sites stats.
Anyone else noticed a big increase in the number of fake abandoned checkouts?
The Google bot I believe I’ve already identified. It always goes by John Smith, fakexxxx@fakemail.com.
It’s still unbelievable that Google bot would create 50+ fake orders. Good or bad, it messes with statistics. I understand the crawling aspect, but creating fake abandoned checkouts? Why?
The other spammer is not Google. IP address 192.241.73.162 came up as an abusive IP address in several sites already so hopefully, something gets done although I don’t have high hopes for it.
