How to Deal With High Risk Orders for Your Clothing Brand

How to Deal with High-Risk Orders: Your Clothing Brand's Worst Nightmare

Cha-Ching! You just got a new order!... Oh my god, and it’s for $500… no way!!! You click the order and there it is… that motherf#$%^*ng red triangle… 

If you’ve ever received a fraudulent order you know how frustrating and annoying it can be. We know the pain. Well, we’re gonna share some tips on the best practices to deal with high-risk orders. Let’s not waste any time, let’s get into it!

First, lets begin with the harsh truth. No matter how much you try, or how many systems you put in place, chargebacks are still going to come through. You can’t eliminate them entirely, but there are many ways to lower the percentage, or, even prevent yourself from being financially responsible for the chargeback. 

For each order you receive on Shopify, you will see a fraud analysis. They are marked low, medium, or high risk. If the order is marked low risk you can fulfill it with confidence. However, if it’s marked medium or high risk, you’ll want to confirm some details or cancel the order completely. 

Medium-Risk orders will show a yellow triangle on your order page.

High-Risk orders will be marked with a red triangle.

You can see this order was canceled because it was a high risk of fraud. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to dealing with these orders, but here is our advice:

Medium Risk: You should look at the fraud analysis and try to identify anything suspicious. Such as multiple failed credit card attempts, or completely different shipping and billing addresses. Keep in mind these things can still occur in valid orders, so your best course of action is to reach out to the customer and confirm their order. 

You can ask if they can confirm their identity, by sending a photo of ID, and confirming they intended to place the order. By doing so, if you get a chargeback, you can include the confirmation in your dispute, and be more likely to win the dispute. 

High Risk: In our experience, it’s best practice to immediately cancel and refund any orders that come in marked high-risk. Majority of the time these orders are fraudulent, and will result in a chargeback. Now, we have seen times when a high-risk order can actually be a valid order, but it's rare. Like the medium-risk order, you can reach out to the customer to confirm, but that's up to you. In our experience, it’s been most profitable to just cancel the order immediately. 

Ultimately, you are going to receive high-risk orders. There is no way to avoid them, so the best thing you can do is to prepare and decide your plan to handle them.

If you’d like to learn more about high-risk orders and preventing chargebacks, we are creating a full in-depth guide on how to handle high-risk orders and chargebacks, with email templates, countries to avoid, things to look for, Shopify apps to help, and other good practices. If that interests you, keep an eye out and subscribe for emails. It'll be coming out soon! 

Thanks for reading this far! If you’ve learned anything about high-risk orders than we’ve succeeded :) Let us know what topics you’d like us to cover next!

Terms Used:

Shopify Fraud Analysis: Every order you receive gets a fraud analysis. These are marked by low, medium, or, high-risk

Chargeback: When the customer's bank reverses the charge on your store, refunding the full cost to the customer, and charging you a fee. (Generally $15)

Fraudulent Order: Orders placed with unauthorized or stolen credit cards

Low-Risk Order: Very likely to be a valid order. Fulfill with confidence

Medium-Risk Order: Might be fraudulent

High-Risk Order: Likely to be fraudulent and cause a chargeback