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Selling

Fraud Protection and Blocked Visitors

Score orders for risk, hold a risky order before it ships, and stop a specific visitor from reaching your store or buying from it by IP address, email or phone.

Overview

Insights → Fraud protection scores your orders for risk so you can look at the risky ones before you ship them. Settings → Blocked visitors stops a particular person from reaching your store.

Nothing here cancels or refunds an order on its own. A risky order is put on hold only when you approve it, and you release the hold yourself.

Fraud protection is on the Growth plan and above. Blocked visitors is on every plan.

Step 1: Score your orders

On the Orders list, click Check risk. Each order that has not been scored yet gets a risk score from 0 to 100, based on signals such as a high order value, an online order with no shipping address, an order placed in the small hours, or a large quantity of one item.

Insights → Fraud protection then lists the scored orders: High at 40 and above, the score at which a paid order is suggested for a hold, Medium from 20, and Low below that. The Risk column on Orders and the badge on an order's page use the same bands. High risk only narrows the list.

Step 2: Hold a risky order

Paid orders that score 40 or more and have not shipped are suggested for a hold under Home → Suggestions: "This order looks risky", with the reasons. Approve the suggestion to put the order on hold. A held order shows On hold and cannot be fulfilled.

When you are happy with it, open the order and click Release hold. It can then be fulfilled as normal. Releasing cancels and refunds nothing. Release hold clears every reason the order is held for, not only the risk hold, so if the page lists another reason (a disputed payment, for example), deal with that first. See Orders on hold.

Block a visitor

Go to Settings → Blocked visitors.

  1. Choose Block by: IP address, IP range, Email or Phone.
  2. Enter the value.
  3. Add a Reason, and a note for your records if you like.
  4. Keep an Expires time, 30 days unless you change it.

An IP address or range stops the visitor reaching your store at all. An email or phone stops them at checkout, at sign-in, when booking or making an offer, and on your contact, quote and builder forms, whatever connection they use. A phone number without a country code is read as North American, so 416 555 0100 and +1 416 555 0100 are the same number. The shopper sees a general "we can't complete this request" message, never that they were blocked.

Prefer email or phone where you have them, keep an expiry on, and use an IP range only as a last resort, because it can block other people on the same network. A block applies to your store only. Unblock removes it.