Managing high-risk orders with Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow is a free ecommerce automation platform that enables you to automate tasks and processes within your Shopify store and across your apps. You can use Shopify Flow to automate certain tasks in your Shopify admin, such as your management of high-risk orders.

If you receive a banner in your Shopify admin about installing Shopify Flow, then you can click Install Flow and immediately activate a workflow that captures payments on low-risk and medium-risk orders automatically. If not, then you can install Shopify Flow from the Shopify App Store and then either use a pre-made template or create your own workflow.

Before using Shopify Flow to manage high-risk orders

When you make or edit a workflow to manage high-risk orders, ensure that you use the Order risk analyzed trigger instead of the Order created trigger. This is because fraud analysis takes some time to process after an order is created. Workflows that start with the Order risk analyzed don't run immediately after an order is created, and instead are triggered when the fraud analysis is completed on an order.

After you activate a workflow that determines whether a payment should be captured, ensure that credit card authorization and capture is set to capture manually in your settings. Workflows that manage capturing payments don't function if automatic capture is activated.

Setting up Shopify Flow workflows

You can automate common tasks performed in Shopify by creating workflows in Shopify Flow that have triggers, conditions, and actions. To use Shopify Flow to manage high-risk orders, you can set up commonly used workflows. For example, you can capture payment if the order is not high risk, or cancel and restock high-risk orders. These workflows operate based on information from Shopify's fraud analysis.

Capture an order that is not high fraud risk

This workflow captures payment for risk and medium-risk orders, and avoids capturing payment for high-risk orders. You can install the template automatically or you can manually install the template and customize it in the Shopify admin by performing the following steps.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Apps and sales channels.

  2. Click Shopify Flow.

  3. Click Open app.

  4. Click Create workflow.

  5. Click Browse templates.

  6. Select Risk, and then select Capture payment if order is not high fraud risk.

  7. Click Install.

  8. Optional: If you want to track orders that have not been fulfilled, then do the following:

    1. In the Check if box, click the + indicator next to Otherwise.
    2. Click Action.
    3. Select an action. For example, you can use the Add order tags action to add a tag, or the Send internal email action to send an email to yourself or your staff to indicate payment was not captured.
  9. Do one of the following:

    • To save the workflow and start using it, click Turn on workflow.
    • To save the workflow without activating it, click Exit.

Cancel and restock high-risk orders

This workflow cancels high-risk orders and restocks items in the orders. It also adds a tag to the order, adds a tag to the customer that placed the order, and sends an email indicating that an order was canceled due to high risk. You can install the template automatically or you can manually install the template and customize it in the Shopify admin by performing the following steps.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Apps and sales channels.

  2. Click Shopify Flow.

  3. Click Open app.

  4. Click Create workflow.

  5. Click Browse templates.

  6. Select Risk, and then select Cancel and restock high risk orders.

  7. Optional: To edit the actions taken by the workflow, click the action that you want to change. For example, to change the destination of the email, click the Send internal email box, and then change your.email@example.com to the email address that you want to use.

  8. Do one of the following:

    • To save the workflow and start using it, click Turn on workflow.
    • To save the workflow without activating it, click Exit.

Cancel orders for customers who frequently return items

Cancel orders for customers that have returned products five times or more in the last six months. You can install the template automatically or you can manually install the template and customize it in your Shopify admin.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Apps and sales channels.

  2. Click Shopify Flow.

  3. Click Open app.

  4. Click Create workflow.

  5. Click Browse templates.

  6. Select Risk, and then select Cancel orders for customers who frequently return items.

  7. Optional: To edit the actions taken by the workflow, click the action that you want to change. For example, to change the destination of the email, click the Send internal email box, and then change your.email@example.com to the email address that you want to use.

  8. Do one of the following:

    • To save the workflow and start using it, click Turn on workflow.
    • To save the workflow without activating it, click Exit.

Cancel and tag orders from known bad email addresses

Automatically cancel orders that use an email address used for past fraudulent orders. This can be easy for fraudulent customers to work around, but can help interrupt automated fraud. You can install the template automatically or you can manually install the template and customize in your Shopify admin.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Apps and sales channels.

  2. Click Shopify Flow.

  3. Click Open app.

  4. Click Create workflow.

  5. Click Browse templates.

  6. Select Risk, and then select Cancel and tag orders from known bad email addresses.

  7. Optional: To edit the actions taken by the workflow, click the action that you want to change. For example, to change the destination of the email, click the Send internal email box, and then change your.email@example.com to the email address that you want to use.

  8. Do one of the following:

    • To save the workflow and start using it, click Turn on workflow.
    • To save the workflow without activating it, click Exit.
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