Last Updated on by Dan S
Originally Published March 24, 2021.


If you have been into the e-commerce industry and running your online store, you must be ready to face both good and bad customers. Besides, there are the customers who are not even the customers; they are just fraud, hackers, or involved in ransomware. Running an online store that is open to anyone to place an order, is not an easy task and bears a high level of risk. These businesses are often faced with several critical factors that may put an end to their business, if not controlled properly.  This article serves as a quick guide to blocking/blacklisting the customers and handling fraud on a Shopify store. It serves as a very useful piece of information if you are soon planning to shift your online store to Shopify. 

Let’s understand it with an example. Consider yourself as a merchant running an apparel subscription brand. You check all order details to deliver the required product to the customer. In the course of the process, you need to manage many things internally. When you are faced with an explosion of canceled orders, you try to cover a lot of details to foil it immediately. One such detail is handling the fraud and blacklisting those customers who try to defraud you. 

When the retailers observe suspicious patterns in a specific geographical area or particular accounts, they instantly curb it by blocking many users they think are suspicious. However, many online store businesses are not aware of how to do the same. On the Shopify store, it becomes easier.

Shopify’s Fraud Filter App

Being an online business, you must have a list of the banned customers so that they cannot place an order. Shopify’s free app called Fraud Filter can help you do this. The app lets people set up the standards, criteria, and rules to block the customers, scanning them through their name, address, phone number, email, and other contact details.

How Does It Work?

When any order matches your set criteria of filter, the Fraud Filter app will flag it as risky or warn you or robotically cancel it, based on the corresponding actions you have set in the filter.  When a Fraud Filter identifies an order as suspicious, the order is marked as medium risk, and you can easily extract that order out for the fraud analysis. 

If you get an order having details you want to create a filter with, you can do the same via the order page. Click the more actions menu, and select the ‘Create fraud rule’ that opens Fraud Filter and lets you edit the new filter before saving any new changes. It also allows you to add more filters, edit or remove existing ones, or see the orders that triggered a particular filter.

Though there are some other similar apps for the same; however, the Fraud Filter app from Shopify seems to impress most of the users.