How can I use FLOW to identify first time customers on the Orders Summary Page?

Shopify Plus
1

the title is what I want to accomplish.

The reason is that we are getting crushed with criminals using our site to test stolen credit cards. They all display the same behavior. I don’t know if its the same person, but we have 100s of them over the last 6 months.

We keep applying more restrictions and they keep changing their ordering practices.

The only way I know to see how many orders the customer has made is to click on each order.

I need to see in the list who is a first time customer.

We have been in business for 26 years. We have been on shopify for 14 years.

Here is a list of our last 25 orders and how many times the customer of each order has ordered before.

  1. 2 (suspicious)

  2. 2 (suspicious)

  3. 1 (suspicious)

  4. 4

  5. 2 (ok based on how they ordered)

  6. 5 (customer has ordered more than 5, must have different emails)

  7. 61 orders

  8. 14

  9. 17

  10. 134

  11. 12

  12. 38

13 55

  1. 2

  2. 102

  3. 6

  4. 4

  5. 62

  6. 47

  7. 7

  8. 65

  9. 1 (Looks ok)

  10. 134

  11. 8

  12. 18

All of these customers were 1st time customers once. Right now I am cancelling 90% of first time orders.

  1. There is no help from

Shopify - is providing no help or guidance

Authorize.net (gateway) - completely worthless

BankCard USA (our processor) - Calling them today

We don’t use shopify for our payments.

None of these issues use PAYPAL, because PAYPAL has restrictions.

The credit card industry encourages fraud because they charge $25 to the merchant for each case.

Its like the police charging the victims of crimes for being victims.

1 Like
2

Hi @QDD ,

Sounds like you’re being targeted for credit card testing, it’s most likely automated through scripting.

Before we talk about after-checkout actions, like setting up Flow for auto-canceling orders, let’s make sure your checkout is protected against this type of attack.

1. Do you have manual payment capture enabled?

This is extremely important, because you’re going to be paying for transaction fees both ways. First when the customer’s card is charged, and second when you cancel and refund the fraudulent order.

Once you have this in place, we can focus on only capturing charges on the real orders, and ignore the fake ones.

How to enable manual payment capture for your checkout on Shopify.

2. Do you have Shopify Plus?

If so, there’s Advanced Bot Protection available that you can activate by contacting Shopify. This will help disrupt the attacker’s bots from actually checking out.

Even if you don’t have Plus, that’s ok, you can handle these fraudulent orders with Flow and only capture payment on real orders. I assume the Shopify Fraud analysis is pretty accurate for your case.

Automating capturing low risk transactions and canceling high risk transactions with Shopify Flow

Here’s a Flow template that you can import into your Shopify Flow app to automatically capture payment on your low risk orders, while canceling the high risk ones:

Download Shopify Flow template

Are you finding that Shopify Fraud Risk Analysis is accurately differentiating between the good orders and bad orders? If not, I can show you how to customize the Flow template to use the order count of a customer instead like you mentioned.

3

First off, I appreciate your reply.

Are you employed by Shopify? I just want to understand where someone is coming from so I know how to reply properly.

4

Of course, happy to help @QDD , I’ve been fighting fraud online for the past 10+ years.

No I’m not employed by Shopify, my profile shows I’m a Shopify Partner (under my photo on the left hand side). I’m the founder of Real ID.

Hope this helps,

5

I thought you meant the act of Congress. I see your APP it looks very interesting. Congratulations.

I appreciate your response. Your replies are correct and good replies. I thought maybe I would just share my perspective.

  1. Manual Payments: I just feel like it would be another task to always approve payments. If I had a huge staff and I could delegate it, I would do so. The cost of to and from fees, aren’t worth the effort, but you are right. Most people have no idea that a merchant pays for the fees on the sale and the return. Returns are not free and they are not a “What’s the difference?” situation. Which I hear from people. A $1000 return can cost a merchant $100.

  2. Shopify Plus is an very sore subject with me. I will be blunt and say its wildly overpriced. Overpriced to the point of being offensive. I feel like it caters to companies with Shark Tank type investor money. Companies that burn through cash on things they don’t need because the cash has no value when you didn’t earn it. Like high end furniture in their offices. How can a business that does $500k a year afford shopify plus? They can’t. I know they have been offering it at a discount of $399 for two months. My message to shopify is I will never pay $1.00 for it. It should be given to me for being a shopify user for 14 years and teaching shopify so many of the things that are now part of the site. I used to feel like a valued customer of shopify. I was a huge ambassador. I feel like I’m trapped. I despise shopify, but I could never afford to leave.

  3. FLOW. This is the best asset and greatest addition to shopify that was ever done. I have been under-utilizing this because I have been scared of it. I got into it today and I have started creating all kinds of things.

My real issue was

How can I identify first time customers on the order page?

Solution: The only way I found to create a marker on the order page was one that was already in practice. The customer note.

So I pivoted to “How can I add something to the customer note section to force the icon to appear?” I created a FLOW to do this. Now when a first time customer orders, it will put a customer note on the order. So I will see it when I print the orders and I can just put my pointer over the note and it will display the note without clicking on the order.

Then I said “How else can I do it?”

When a first time customer orders, I receive an email that says “FRAUD ALERT” first time customer.

Now I have two ways to be notified of a first time customer and it didn’t cost me anything.

Your suggestion of FLOW forced me to use it.

Thank you

6

Thanks for getting back to me, @QDD - I agree Plus is out of reach for most. But just giving an option, since it’s simple to implement and is at least a first line of defense to at least cut down on the volume of fraudulent orders.

Yes, Flow is amazing. The Shopify Flow team did an excellent job of making an automation system that’s so flexible. It truly is an huge boost in productivity without having to hire a developer.

Great, so it sounds like you have a notification system for first time purchasers let you know to investigate before fulfilling.

Can you tell me more about your investigation process after this alert has been added to an order?

How do you determine if this order is safe to fulfill? Do you reach out to the customer or do you just use your gut and look for patterns that you’ve noticed in the past?

For examile, if the customer’s email address is auto-generated email address or a disposable email like protonmail, etc?

Do you consider on the Shopify Fraud Analysis at all? Or do you disregard it?

Do you email/text the customer to confirm the order?

Just curious, our system is typically used for high end purchases that have the high return/chargeback risk. Since your notification system will also trigger for the lower end of orders, I’d just like to learn about your approach for those. There’s not as much margin to spend too much time investigating.

7

Here’s your paragraph with the adjusted link:

You can integrate WhatsApp with Shopify Flow to automate verification for first-time customers before processing their order. Here’s how:

Step 1: Identify First-Time Customers in Shopify Flow

  • Trigger: “Order Created”
  • Condition: Check if Customer Order Count = 1
  • Action: Tag them as “First-Time Customer”

Step 2: Automate WhatsApp Verification

  • Use a WhatsApp Business API (like Twilio, WATI, or Zoko) to send an automatic message to first-time customers.
  • Message Example:
    “Hi [Customer Name], we noticed this is your first order with us. Please reply YES to confirm your purchase within 30 minutes, or it will be canceled.”
  • If they reply YES, process the order. If no response, auto-cancel the order.

Benefits:
Stops fraudsters using stolen cards.
Ensures real customers confirm their orders.
Saves time by automating verification.

For additional customization, some users explore modified WhatsApp apps like GBWhatsApp. However, note that unofficial versions may carry security risks and violate WhatsApp’s terms.

Would you like help setting up the WhatsApp integration? :rocket:

8

How do I determine if the order is legit.

  1. I look at what they ordered. Are there any patterns of ordering that are suspicious.

  2. I look at how they paid. If they paid with Paypal, I’m done. I accept it.

  3. if its on our merchant account (we don’t use shopify payments) I look at the fraud report.

If anything is off, I cancel it. The only thing I will accept is that the IP address is a small distance from their shipping address.

Anything else and the order is cancelled.

If it passes, then I email them.

I tell them we vet all first time customers and we would like to know how they found out about us, if they have every ordered before with a different email address and what other companies they bought from that sell similar products.

If they don’t respond, I cancel.

New customers are the worst. We have considered making the website members only and charging new customers a membership fee.

New customers complain the most, spend the least, have the highest risk of fraud and false claims of non-delivery.

We cancel 75% of new orders. We don’t need them.

9

Got it, so it’s mix of heuristics.

Rule #2 is definitely Flow-able.

Rule #1 is more human judgement, and based off of gut.

Even starting the vetting process is possible to automate. You can hold the order in flow for these first time customers under investigation.

Do you sell custom made or high end goods? I assume this process is worth it then, because the risk is so high. I recall you mentioned $1,000+ orders cost 10% in returns.

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