Last Updated on by Dan S
Originally Published March 24, 2021.
As a store owner, you’re bound to encounter a diverse range of customers, including those who aren’t genuine buyers but rather fraudsters, hackers, or individuals involved in ransomware. Managing an online store that is accessible to everyone comes with inherent risks. Unchecked, these risks can severely impact your business.
This guide is designed to help you understand how to block or blacklist fraudulent customers on your Shopify store, ensuring a safer and smoother operation.
Why It’s Crucial to Manage Fraud in Your Shopify Store
Consider yourself as a merchant managing an apparel subscription brand. Your day involves scrutinizing order details to ensure timely and accurate deliveries. Amidst this, handling a surge in canceled orders can be daunting, requiring immediate action to prevent financial losses.
One key aspect of this is identifying and blocking customers attempting to defraud your business. In 2025, ecommerce fraud losses are projected to reach $48 billion globally, with every dollar lost to fraud costing merchants an average of $4.61. Implementing effective fraud prevention measures not only protects your revenue but also maintains the integrity of your business and builds trust with genuine customers.
The Solution: Shopify’s Fraud Control App
Shopify sunset its original Fraud Filter app on January 31, 2025, recommending merchants migrate to Shopify Flow and the Fraud Control app. The free Fraud Control app creates a dashboard in your Shopify admin that displays analytics related to fraud or potential fraud on your store, providing details on chargebacks, Shopify Protect, orders canceled due to fraud, and the general level of risk your store is exposed to.
By setting up specific criteria and rules through Fraud Control checkout rules, the app can block suspicious checkouts before they become orders, scanning customer information such as IP address, email, and other contact details to identify and prevent fraudulent activity.
How the Fraud Control App Works
Here’s how the Fraud Control app can help safeguard your store:
- Monitor Your Fraud Dashboard: View your dashboard by going to Apps > Fraud Control in your Shopify admin, where you can see acceptance rates, high risk orders percentages, and fraudulent chargebacks.
- Create Checkout Rules: Fraud Control checkout rules allow you to filter and block potentially-fraudulent orders based on a set of rules that you define, blocking checkouts from becoming orders. You can create filters based on IP addresses, email addresses, and address attributes.
- Automated Protection: Rules need to be created carefully to block fraud while avoiding blocking legitimate checkouts, though these rules don’t guarantee that chargebacks won’t happen. When a checkout matches your criteria, it will be blocked with an error message.
Additional Fraud Prevention Options
Fraud Control checkout rules are only available for merchants using Shopify Payments. For those needing more advanced protection or not using Shopify Payments, there are numerous third-party fraud prevention apps available in the Shopify App Store.
Popular alternatives include apps like Blockify Fraud Filter & Blocker, which allows you to block IPs, countries, bots, and spy extensions while preventing fraudulent orders using proxy, Tor, VPN detection, and AI fraud filters, as well as enterprise solutions like NoFraud, Signifyd, and ClearSale that offer chargeback guarantees and advanced AI-powered fraud detection.
Conclusion
In the dynamic world of e-commerce, protecting your business from fraudulent activities is paramount. By leveraging Shopify’s Fraud Control app alongside Shopify Flow, or choosing from the many third-party fraud prevention solutions available, you can proactively manage and block suspicious customers, ensuring a safer and more reliable shopping experience for your genuine customers.
Implementing these strategies not only helps in safeguarding your revenue but also strengthens your business’s reputation and customer trust. Embrace these tools to create a secure and thriving online store.
