How to Prevent Any Online Order From Being Cancelled

Sometimes orders on web stores get cancelled or delayed and it isn't always clear why.  Some people will contact the website, but many will not and never figure out the answer. The big reason why any online order would be cancelled is suspected fraud.  Believe it or not, even small stores have to deal with people attempting to use stolen credit cards to purchase merchandise and for items that wouldn't always be expected.  So why would a legitimate order be confused with fraud?  Here are some small things you can do to make ordering online have 0 trouble.

1) Try not to use a different billing and shipping address if at all possible.

One of the biggest indicators of fraud is a mismatch of billing and shipping addresses, especially if it's between two different states.  More often then not when these two don't line up, we will take a closer look at the information in the order and find things don't add up.  Often it won't even be something that makes sense billing a business and shipping to a house, it will be something odd like a mobile home shipping something expensive to a nice house.  We're unsure exactly why they, the criminal will obviously never have the shipping address as their house, but we think having different bill to and ship to makes it easier to change the delivery location later with the carrier and intercept the stolen goods to resell later.  If having different billing and shipping addresses is a must, there is an easy way to deal with it

2) If different addresses are needed, include the reason in the order comments. Frankly use the order comments in general.

Very few of these orders will have a comment, or if they do it's something nonsensical and odd like "hey I'm excited for your product" or something, usually in worse english, that makes it much more obvious it's a fraud order.  So just writing 1 brief line about why these don't match up goes a long way.  If you're ordering something as a gift, just write that it's a gift for whoever.  If you're billing your business or shipping to it, write it in the order comments.  If it's for a summer home, tell us.  A personal example is when I wanted to send a prize donation to an event I was going to be attending in another part of the country, I wrote that down in the comments and it shipped no problem despite a california bill to and a virginia ship to.  If we have to guess and any of the other information looks a bit off, then we might not want to gamble on being out merchandise and shipping cost and just cancel the order.

3) Use an email address with either part of your name or initials in it.

We've had a few orders where everything looked fine, except the email was something odd, we shrug and send the package off, but next day we get a call from the guy in the order saying it was fraud.  They would confirm the rest of the information was correct, but the email would be a gmail address with a bunch of random sounds followed by a random number, which more frequently than not, they are.  Having the email look like it belongs to the person placing the order goes a long way.  We understand not wanting to use a regular email address in an attempt to prevent spam, but if the domain doesn't exist or the address looks odd we might just cancel it, especially if other information is fake and we can't contact the person from the order with the given information.

4) Turn off your VPN when placing the order.

If anything in your order looks odd, we will check the IP address the order way placed from.  If it says it's an IP from a different state or country, it basically confirms it's invalid.  Fraudulent orders will often have IP addresses that don't match where the order is billed or shipped to, and it's likely the IP is either where the person with the stolen credit card is or the IP is just set to a random place in the US.  If it's a legitimate order it will likely be placed near to either the bill or ship to address even from mobile since most people live near to where they work.  On mobile it doesn't really look odd if the IP is somewhere slightly different, but desktop if the order isn't close to either it's a big red flag.

One thought that may cross your mind is that someone could look at this and use this to commit fraud better, except legitimizing the information takes too long when time is working against the person using a stolen credit card.  Spending the time to make convincing information might end up being time wasted before the card is cancelled.  Most of the fraudulent orders we see on our website aren't necessarily done sloppily, it's done hastily using the fastest methods.  The amount of convincing fraud we've seen is maybe 1 or 2 examples, where the amount of legitimate orders that we have either had to cancel or actually pick up the phone and call the person who placed the order is almost as high if not slightly higher than actual fraud cases.  It's wasted time for us, it's obscenely annoying for the person who placed the order, the best thing about online shopping is not having to deal with anybody, and it's just a headache all around.  If you follow what the article says, things will be much smoother for all involved.