How to Protect Your Ecommerce Store from Fraud Risks & Spam

For any online store owner, the growing number of spammers and online frauds has become a matter of grave concern. We quickly analyzed online frauds and discovered that e-commerce fraud losses have reached $20 billion annually globally. In the United States alone, e-commerce fraud losses are projected to exceed $6 billion annually.

For every e-commerce transaction, the average risk of online fraud is nearly 1-2%, and mobile transactions are likely to have higher fraud risks. So, if you have an online store and you don’t have a fraud prevention strategy, you’re preparing for an epic downfall. 

In this guide about ecommerce fraud prevention, we will talk about the threats that spammers bring to you and how you protect your online store.

The Threat of Spammers for Online Sellers

Before we walk you through the steps of preventing your WooCommerce store from spammers, let’s first see what threats spammers bring with them. Honestly, they can create a great nuisance for any e-commerce business. For instance, spammers can:

1. Post fake reviews and ratings about your online store

Spammers can create a nuisance by posting fake positive reviews or ratings for your stores. They can also praise your competitors and degrade your store. This sort of negative publicity will not help your store have positive branding. 

2. Run phishing scams for your store 

Spammers are equipped with the expertise that is needed to plan phishing scams on any business.

They can dupe you by sending emails, messages, and calls to scam you and steal sensitive logins and financial data information.  

3. Plan unauthorized advertisements 

If spammers have ill intentions, they can flood all the leading online marketplaces and seller forums with unsolicited advertisements for their products or services. They can post abundant ads, making it difficult for legitimate WooCommerce store owners to reach the targeted audience.  

4. Perform competitive sabotage activities 

Some spammers can go even beyond by flagging legitimate listings as spam or reporting false policy violations. This becomes a serious issue for you as your legitimate online store can be removed from online listings (such as Google product feeds) that seriously impact your market reputation and brand image. 

5. Manipulate your product prices 

Spammers can give you serious trouble by using fully automated bots to adjust product prices frequently, making it challenging for sellers to maintain competitive pricing. This way, they can hamper your profit margin and make it difficult for you to sell the product effectively. 

6. Hack your accounts 

Spammers can use techniques like credential stuffing attacks or social engineering to take over your account and gain full control over product listing, funds, and other key account processes. 

How it Affects Your eCommerce Business

Ecommerce fraud prevention is the need of the hour as the troubles that spammers make are tough to handle for any online store owner. Here’s how it can affect your online business:

1. Busy Backend Team

Spammers engage in multiple activities, and their fraudulent behavior is very harmful. Your backend team will find the presence of spammers and track their movement. They will have a close watch over their movements.

This unwanted and unnecessary job keeps the backend team busy for days to come. They get diverted from the main agenda, which is not good.

2. Pocket-Heavy Product Returns

In some cases, spammers themselves may engage in fraudulent returns. They may purchase items intending to return them after using or reselling them. 

This is a serious concern for any WooCommerce store owner as they have to bear WooCommerce shipping expenses even when the product is correct and is returned based on false acquisitions. 

3. Multiple Trips to Fake Locations

Spammers often enter fake delivery locations just to harm an online store. But, you can’t realize it and will continue making multiple trips to the provided delivery locations. 

As the delivery location will be fake, delivery won’t happen. Despite that, your shipping partner will charge you for these unpaid and unsuccessful deliveries. This incurs unnecessary shipping costs and can disrupt your supply chain.

4. Extra Load on your Digital Infrastructure

Spammers launch DDoS attacks and perform data scraping at a large scale. Your technical team will be busy getting these things resolved. In addition, all these actions will increase the extra burden on the existing digital infrastructure.

When spammers do this, it impacts a website’s performance. The website is flooded with unwanted requests and remains inaccessible to legitimate users. They will experience slow response and won’t be able to purchase at all. This way, you’re losing real customers, and your technical team is busy resolving problems that shouldn’t be there in the first place.  

Chances of Hackers/Bots Taking Over Your Site

Spammers can deploy multiple bots to conduct multiple fraudulent activities and at times, the number of bots can become so high that the risk of account takeover increases exponentially. If that happens, hacking bots can easily gain control over your site and steal crucial customer data, mess up the product listing, and cause serious operational disruptions.

All the above troubles that a spammer is going to make are unwanted hassles and can consume a great deal of time, effort, and crucial resources. So, e-commerce fraud prevention should remain the priority of any store owner. 

The Solution: WooCommerce Fraud Prevention Plugin

If any store wants to thrive in the digital world, having the right eCommerce fraud prevention strategy is the first step. However, eCommerce fraud prevention is something that requires a great deal of attention.  

The easy way out of this problem is to use a WooCommerce fraud prevention plugin that can take care of every aspect in this regard. Designed to provide extensive WooCommerce fraud prevention, this plugin greatly relieves every WooCommerce store owner. Let us decode this plugin for you.

WooCommerce Fraud Prevention plugin is a feature-rich e-commerce fraud prevention plugin that every WooCommerce store should use to keep spammers away from their WooCommerce shipping process, order processing, checkout, payment, and other key workflows.

The plugin is capable to:

• Keep fake orders at bay and accept only the verified and genuine orders
• Deny the orders that are placed from blacklisted ZIP codes or IP addresses
• Keep the unauthorized transactions at bay
• Automatically block a customer when frequent fake or false orders are placed. The plugin is designed to block users based on their IP address, domain, registration, and many other factors.
• Set up a specific payment gateway for payment whitelisting
• Set up fraud rules and weight restrictions

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The plugin offers extensive e-commerce fraud prevention and protection. No wonder it has been trusted by over 70,000 WooCommerce owners and has 5,000+ active premium customers.

Before you also plan to use this e-commerce fraud prevention plugin, understand that this plugin:

• Is compatible with 8.0.x WooCommerce version 
• Supports JS, CSS, and PHP file versions 
• Is available in English and German language 
• Comes with a 14-day money guarantee 
• Provide great technical support as and when you use it 

Overall, the plugin delivers dependable e-commerce fraud prevention assistance for WooCommerce store owners.

How it Helps to Protect Your Online Store

Let’s learn how this plugin can help you avoid worrying about e-commerce fraud.

• It can quickly identify and block spammers before they cause significant damage to you.
• The plugin integrates directly into WooCommerce shipping processes and analyzes the order processing to sense any delivery fraud.
• If you have suspicions about a specific customer, you can easily block them without notifying them. This way, you can prevent them from accessing your store and cause damage.  
• It provides blocking and fraud reports to understand your at-place eCommerce fraud prevention strategy better.

How to Use the WooCommerce Fraud Prevention Plugin?

Here’s a list of steps you must follow to start using this plugin.

Step 1: Download the plugin

You can download this plugin by accessing your WordPress site > Plugins.

Here, enter the name of the plugin, WooCommerce Fraud Prevention. Get the free plugin from this link, or use the premium version for your store.

Step 2: Setup the plugin

Based on your eCommerce fraud prevention requirements, you can configure the plugin. There are multiple options given to you. Decide which parameter to block a user and save the changes.

Besides the above, there is a super-long list of criteria for which you can configure fraud prevention rules in this plugin’s settings. For example, first name, domain extension, last name, and so on.

Want to block users from accessing your website from a particular browser or location? Why not.

You can even block users by phone number, shipping zone or user role.

Final Words!

The growing threat of spam and fraudulent activity in eCommerce stores is an issue worth paying serious attention to. The damages caused by spammers can significantly affect your profitability, brand reputation, and overall business workflow.

E-commerce fraud prevention should, therefore, be a priority for every WooCommerce store owner. Thankfully, we have robust tools like the WooCommerce Fraud Prevention plugin that effectively help deter spammers and fraudulent activities, offering a proactive solution to protect your business.

Remember, when dealing with spammers, prevention is the best solution. Stay ahead, stay informed, and most importantly, keep your WooCommerce store safe. Be proactive about eCommerce fraud prevention, ensure your back-end team focuses on growth-oriented activities rather than spam activities, and maintain the trust of your genuine customers.

In the digital world, safety is paramount. By integrating a solid fraud prevention strategy, your WooCommerce store can operate smoothly, efficiently, and, most importantly, safely. Don’t wait for spammers to strike; get the WooCommerce Fraud Prevention plugin and secure your online store today.