I have a niche market, but have opted out of shipping internationally (US only) because of risk of fraud and lack of reliable tracking services. I’m not knowledgeable enough of international shipping and it generally seems to be a pain.
Recently, I have been receiving orders from a service that forwards mail to the Philippines, Forwarder LBC Express. They seem to be a legit service. The first few orders I received weeks ago were not significant, I decided to process them and see what happens. Now, I have received several significant orders.
Shopify is flagging them as high risk, mostly because of ip address country and physical address (the US shipping forwarder). I have never had another US mail forwarder use us, and have no idea why the orders are coming from the Philippines suddenly. Maybe the forwarder is suggesting us to customers?
I’m wondering if anyone has dealt with this company or similar US forwarders? How much risk am I opening myself up to? I was considering contacting the customer, but if I do contact the customer to verify, what exactly would I verify?
I am having this same issue with LBC EXPRESS shipping forwarding company. 5 orders so far that have been flagged fraud. I am forced to refund their order and I am losing money on credit card fees. Please Shopify give advice on this. I am getting very frustrated at this point!
I have contacted the LBC express, and they check on the accounts that have tried purchasing through me, and say they are new clients so there’s nothing he can do to stop this.
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Hi! same here. I get several orders from the Phillippines for my anime products. I originally set up my shipping criteria to include the Phillippines then stopped shipping to PH when several orders came in at risk for fraud. Now, PH customers are placing orders using LBC. LBC or Shipping Cart appears to be a legitimate business that forwards freight directly to the Philippines. The customers order from my shop and get flagged by the fraud detector because their demographics don’t match. I actually emailed the customers asking to verify details. The customers actually do respond and will verify details but there is no way for me to confirm them. The issue is, this is a recent ongoing problem. Currently, my solution is to refund the orders but this is no solution because you are left with fees for doing so. I’ve tried to reach out to Shopify but you can’t get through to them at all. This is a serious problem. I hope someone can help.
I have had a dry spell of no new orders & now in the past week I have had 1 large order and 1 small order for delivery to Cebu City Philippines & Freight Forwarder in Burbank California. I connected with the Cebu City customer and they changed the address to a Bay Area freight forwarder. The most recent customer paid with a JCB credit card and asked that I refund to a PayPal account when I advised I was cancelling the order.
Did anyone actually receive chargebacks for orders fulfilled?
I had 5 chargebacks for all 5 orders linked to the mail forwarder, all 5 disputes were awarded by the bank to the customer despite correspondence I had confirming some information.
I would highly recommend not accepting these orders, cancel immediately. And absolutely do not refund on any payment other than the original payment processed. They are just trying to scam you out of additional money by using another account for refund and will then dispute the original charge.
HI! I was getting orders from customers in the PI a lot and didn’t know
what to make of it. I was also canceling the orders due to fraud risk until
I began asking my customers questions. Yes, freight forwarding or virtual
warehouses are a thing especially for those who live in PI because of duty
taxes they’re required to pay when shipped directly from the US.
I began testing, so I shipped a couple of orders. So far it’s been months
and these orders have not been charged back.
But still proceed with caution. The orders I fulfilled were not expensive
just in case.
Thanks!
My chargebacks were not submitted until months after the original purchase. That’s why I got comfortable sending bigger orders a month or so after the initial small orders. Just FYI, you still might get dinged.
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Over the last year I had gotten a few orders from Florida; upon further research after processing some of them, I discovered the customers were employing a ship forwarding company based in Florida. And they used a similar process, purchasing a few small items, building a relationship with my store-then going for a very expensive item, that charged back–on a good note the first large chargeback I won (I use Chargeflow, they are AWESOME!)…anyhoo, these sales started increasing some. Since I’m not a high volume seller, I did two things to fix the problem:
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I changed my capture of payment to manual; now when an order comes in I decide if the money is captured. If you do not capture the money, then you can refund without paying any processing fees. Two of my orders were chargedback were between $1100 and $2200, so going forward, that will be a significant savings.
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In addition to the shopify fraud detection, I downloaded 3 more apps into my store that are fraud detection…now I have a layer of 4 companies looking at my my orders, all for free, and each one provides different information. One of the companies if I click can do even more of a deep dive on the customer.
Lastly, again, I have Chargeflow loaded into my store; when there is a chargeback they immediately go into action; I just provide anything extra to the case, they do EVERYTHING; and quite amazingly I might add. I only pay them a percentage if they win my case, any lost cases, no charge—and for me time and headache is worth their percentage when they win (believe me I’ve handled many chargebacks myself previously) —and they will win if at all possible.
Hope this helps!
Teresa (CEO: My Picks for You)