Shopify is a wild and robust e-commerce platform for taking your business online.
If you’re a Shopify store owner, you’ve probably been approached by people claiming to be Shopify specialists and offering to help you reduce your Shopify store fraud. Unfortunately, there are a lot of fly-by-night specialists out there, and even worse, some of them might even be dangerous scammers. We have plenty of experience with investment scams here on Financial Expert and want to help you avoid scams in all forms.
So it remains to be a matter of concern whether you should trust someone claiming to be able to help you reduce fraud in your Shopify store.
But, the most important question here is as a Shopify owner what can you do for your store? How can you ensure your Shopify store’s safety?
7 hacks to safeguard your Shopify store from frauds in 2021
Running an e-commerce store can be a hassle when you have to deal with chargebacks, hacked, distrust, and more. However, there are certain ways that you can implement to overcome these challenges and easily safeguard your Shopify store. Do you know 80% of customers fill forms for chargebacks just because they used your product and now they want it? These are known as friendly frauds.
Is it even possible to reduce fraud? And how can you reduce it? Well, the short answer is yes.
Here is a comprehensive guide that highlights the top seven ways you can safeguard your Shopify store from e-commerce frauds in 2021.
1. Integrate a secured third-party payment processor
When you use a payment processor, you can take a proactive approach to protect your store from fraud. For example, you can limit the number of transactions your users make per day, block transactions based on certain criteria such as IP address and location, and even retrain your users on how to avoid fraud.
Unfortunately, most payment processors charge a fee for these services. However, some payment processors offer free fraud protection services. One of the best free fraud prevention services you can use is PayPal. If you use PayPal to collect payments for your store, you can also use its fraud prevention tools to protect your store.
2. Undergo intensive training
Knowledge is the ultimate power. This means if you have an end-to-end understanding of how frauds can attack your store, you can prevent them from happening better.
But in doing so you might experience certain hiccups.
There are some unscrupulous individuals out there who want to steal your livelihood by taking advantage of your accounts. If a specialist you’re considering offers to teach you how to prevent fraud, they’re probably not one of those people. It’s more likely that they’re either trying to steal your store or trying to steal your customers.
When you find someone who wants to help you reduce fraud in your Shopify store, make sure that they’re either an expert in Shopify fraud prevention or customer support and have gone through Shopify fraud prevention training.
It’s hard to know how thorough they are without having a proper understanding of the techniques and tools used by these specialists, so it’s strongly recommended that you find a specialist who can demonstrate that they have a proper understanding of Shopify.
3. Create an anti-fraud squad
Having a team dedicated to keeping frauds out of your business system is one of the best decisions that you can make in your business. This will ensure your business is safe and increase authenticity and brand equity in front of your target audience.
Once you choose to trust someone, it’s your responsibility to make sure they are both trustworthy and self-motivated. You can’t afford to take any risk.
You need to be able to trust that your specialist will make every attempt to help you list Shopify, no matter the costs to themselves. If you’re not willing to do so, you need to reconsider whether you can trust them.
You may think that since they’re offering to reduce your fraud, it means they’re more motivated to get it done, but this is not necessarily the case. If your specialist is asking you to use your store to make a commission, then they probably don’t have your best interests at heart. They’re more likely motivated by greed than your best interests.
The recommendation is not to take this approach unless you have a team of experts in place. You need to be able to trust that your team will take on any additional responsibilities that you entrust them with.
4. Review high-value orders
Frauds are smart with their orders.
Yes, you heard it right.
The thing you should do is review all high-value orders you’ve received from customers who were not verified. A lot of Shopify stores have been compromised due to customers not verifying their accounts or placing orders from other people’s accounts.
Depending on what type of fraud you’re dealing with, you may be able to flag orders for review. However, the best way to do this is by creating a report, view products, or check out the history to spot money laundering issues.
You can review the history of all orders in your Shopify store at any time by generating and viewing reports in your Dashboard. If you’re the owner of the business, you will have access to the history. Or make a report to see all the information at any given time.
This will allow you to see who placed the order when it was placed if it was verified, and any other information you require for fraud investigation.
Also, make sure to check for IP addresses and contact details, to make sure the customer actually placed the order and that they are operated by the person who placed the order.
5. Review your accounts
It’s not uncommon for hackers to infiltrate your Shopify store, or someone else’s, by “phishing.” If you don’t verify their account, someone can place an order from your store, and even steal your customers.
Being the owner of the business, you should normally have access to all the information. However, sometimes someone can impersonate you, so make sure to check your domain records, see if the company name matches, and check your email filters.
Sometimes people can do it by working with your email provider. If you’re using a provider like Google, make sure they happen to be authorized to access your account via someone else’s account. In case you are not the owner of the business, you can use the “who viewed my account”.
6. Get fraud prevention tools
Being a business owner it’s not easy to take out time every day to check if everything is
all right or not. So, what can be done? Is there anyone who can do it on your behalf?
Yes. There is one thing which can replace you here. Tools are made to ease your journey towards preventing your Shopify store from fraud. Books about fraud can also help you pick.
Now the question is which tool to use?
The market is full of tools you can use and the best thing is nowadays tools come with additional features which can be free or paid memberships.
This tool guarantees 100% prevention from fraud, chargebacks. It’s a complete solution for your Shopify store. It follows multilayered machine learning and AI to deal with fraudsters and ultimately needs your store growth.
With the increase of your business, you need someone to look after your orders, eliminate fraud and automate all the processes. Well, there is exactly one for you. The tool comes with a decision center that automatically identifies the seller account as authorized or hacked. They provide customers a frictionless and future proof authentication experience.
7. Verify IP address
IP (internet protocol) is a unique ID associate with each network on the internet. With the help of your customer’s IP address, you can cross his IP located in the same place where the customer claims to be from. Ask the below question and you will be able to prevent yourself. Is IP address location mismatching with customer claim location? Is the IP address a proxy IP address? Are you not able to locate the IP address location?
Asking these questions can help you from getting into any scammers. Know your
answers before proceeding further with the orders.
Final thoughts
The best way is to check and get knowledge of your order before proceeding with one.
Don’t get overwhelmed with orders and forget details.
You will find plenty of ways and tools to help you out. Why don’t you use them to scale your business to new heights?
Shopify itself provides full guide and support to its end-user against these frauds. Check them. Spotify analysis provides insight into which order can be fraudulent. It’s always advisable to closely track your orders, payment transactions, and tools you are using. This will help you avoid becoming the victim of financial crime.
Be aware of the person you seek for help for preventing your account. Not all are genuine. eCommerce and its threats are going to walk with you but with little training and making the best use of the discussed point you can minimize the exposure to fraud.
After reading all the ways and getting a fair idea, the real question is which ways are you planning to implement in your Shopify store?