Hey, it's Sabastian. If you sell candles online long enough, one day you are going to get an order that just feels off. Maybe it is for one cheap item but the shipping is weirdly high. Maybe the email address looks like a cat walked across the keyboard. Your gut says something is wrong, and more often than not, your gut is right. This exact question comes up all the time from makers who are just starting to sell online, so I want to walk you through how we handle suspicious orders at Garsnett Beacon. We have shipped a lot of candles over the years, and the good news is that once you know what to look for, spotting and stopping fraud gets a whole lot easier. What a fraudulent order usually looks like The classic one is what is called a card test. Someone gets their hands on a stolen credit card number, and before they go spend big somewhere else, they want to confirm the card actually works. So they find the cheapest thing they can buy, often a single small item, and they run it through. If the charge goes through, they know the card is live. Why your store? Small candle shops are easy, low risk targets for this. The scammer does not care about the candle. They care about testing the card. That is why the order can look strange, like one four dollar item with a shipping charge that makes no sense, or a rushed order at two in the morning to an address that does not match anything else about the buyer. The two things I check first When an order feels wrong, I look at two things before I do anything else. First, the email address. Real customers usually have normal looking emails with their name or something recognizable in them. Fraudulent orders almost always come through with a strange email, a long random string of letters and numbers that no actual person would choose. When you see that, your radar should go up right away. Second, the Shopify Protect badge. If you are on Shopify, open the order and look for the Shopify Protect status. If the order is marked eligible and covered, you are protected from chargebacks as long as you ship with tracking by the deadline Shopify gives you. In that case you can go ahead and fulfill it. If the order does not have Shopify Protect coverage and it is throwing up all the red flags we just talked about, that is when I cancel and refund it. Yes, canceling means you eat the transaction fee. That stings a little, but it is nothing compared to the alternative. If you ship to a stolen card and the real cardholder disputes it, you lose the product, you lose the shipping, and you get hit with a chargeback fee on top. Refunding a suspicious order is almost always the cheaper choice. Set it and forget it with Shopify Flow Checking orders one by one works, but you do not want to be playing fraud detective forever. The better move is to let Shopify do the watching for you, and it is free. Go into the Shopify app store and search for Shopify Flow. It is a free automation tool built right into the platform. Once you have it, look for the fraud prevention templates and turn on these three: Capture payment if an order is not high risk. This lets your normal, safe orders flow through without you lifting a finger. Get notified about high risk orders before capturing payment. This one gives you a heads up so you can eyeball anything questionable before money changes hands. Cancel high risk orders. This automatically stops the obvious bad ones before they ever reach your workbench. Since we set these up, we have not had a single fraudulent order slip through. It is one of those little back end things that nobody tells you about when you are starting a candle business, but it saves you real money and real headaches down the road. A couple of extra habits that help Always ship with tracking. It is your proof of delivery and it is what keeps you covered under Shopify Protect. Skipping tracking to save a few cents is not worth it. Trust the pattern, not the panic. Not every odd order is fraud. Sometimes a great customer just has a funny email or ordered at a strange hour. That is why I look for a combination of signals, the weird email plus no protection plus a card test style purchase, rather than canceling on one flag alone. Over time you will develop a feel for it, the same way you developed a feel for when a candle is cured and ready. Keep your systems simple. A lot of the stress of selling online comes from not having your back end set up cleanly. When your store, your inventory, and your fulfillment are organized, a weird order stands out immediately because everything else runs smoothly. We track our production and inventory in Makers Manager, which keeps the whole operation tight so the exceptions are easy to spot. You have got this Getting your first sketchy order can feel scary, especially when you have poured your heart into every candle. But this is just part of running a real business, and now you know exactly how to handle it. Check the email, check the Shopify Protect status, turn on those three free Flow templates, and always ship with tracking. Do that and fraud becomes a non issue. If you are still building out your online store and want a clear path from the very beginning, grab our free 10 Step Guide to Starting a Candle Business and our free Candle Making Supply Checklist. And come hang out with the thousands of makers in our free Facebook group, where questions like this get answered every single day. We are all figuring it out together. Want to see what all of this can grow into? Come visit Garsnett Beacon Candle Co. and see where a kitchen table hobby can go. Keep pouring, friends.