Blocking Fraudulent Orders on Shopify is Still Kind of a Pain in 2021

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As ecommerce surges ahead so does ecommerce fraud, especially with independent ecommerce retailers. On the largest ecommerce platform for independent shops, Shopify, this is a glaring omission from the toolset they give merchants.

This issue came to light again today when Patrick Coddou, founder and CEO of Supply a Texas-based razor company that landed a $300,000 investment deal on Shark Tank in 2019, tweeted out in frustration about a customer that keeps placing fraudulent orders and their inability to stop them.

Shopify support was quick to respond getting a tweet reply back to Patrick in under 5 minutes. Their official stance is to use a free app built by Shopify called Fraud Filter.

Ecommerce SEO expert Joe Youngblood chimed in that Patrick should at least give the app a try after reviewing the recent 1-star reviews to see if it works to block his fraudster.

It may seem like an odd choice to not simply bundle this type of fraud tool into accounts, but worse yet Fraud Filter isn’t a perfect app. According to recent 1-star reviews of the app it frequently fails to stop fraudulent customers or even work at all.

Here are some of those 1-star reviews

“Has been useful for alerting to staff to unwanted buyers. Unfortunately it will not prevent these buyers checking out so we lose transaction fees when we cancel the orders. Tried to use it to day and it is broken.” – user SMWEngineering on March 10, 2021

“This app does not work. It hasn’t blocked a single order placed by email addresses we have blocked through the app.” – user BIG BUD PRESS on February 7, 2021

“This app didn’t work. An order was placed even though we had set up a filter to cancel the order from a specific email address who we know is fraudulently ordering.” – user Emepelle on January 29, 2021

The good news is that Shopify support has responded to each 1-star review claiming the app did not work correctly or at all and they appear to be taking the issue of fraud seriously. Hopefully this means we will have a much better solution in the near future.

We tend to agree with Joe and Shopify here. If you are experiencing fraud issues on Shopify give the free Fraud Filter app a try before purchasing doing anything else. Since this is an official app there is a better than good chance that it ultimately fixes any issues and works as a good, standard, fraud defense system.

Get the Fraud Filter app on the Shopify App Store here