New Feature: IP Address included in Real-time Post and XML

As a store owner, you are probably unfortunately familiar with receiving fraudulent orders. Yahoo! Store provides a few tools to warn you when orders are suspect. Address Verification (AVS) checks to make sure that the billing address provided in the order matches that of the credit card. CVV2 (the 3-digit number on the back of a VISA and MasterCard credit card) checks to validate if that 3-digit (or sometimes four-digit) number is correct. Both of these types of fraud checking will help you catch potential fraudulent orders.

There is another type of fraud checking that is also available with your Yahoo! Store, the IP Address Blocker. Every order has a unique IP address that indicates the Internet address from which the order in your store was placed. As you review your fraudulent orders, you may notice that many of these share the same IP address or range of IP addresses. Many fraudsters will try ordering with different stolen credit card numbers in order to determine which ones will authorize a charge.

Blocking IP addresses is as simple as adding the IP Address or range of IP addresses to the IP Blocking tool. Even easier, when viewing an order in Order Manager, you can click on the IP Address which directs the IP address and you to the IP Blocking tool. From there, you can flag that IP Address as blocked.

Blocking IP addresses will result in the customer (user) not being able to place an order. They will still be able to look at your product and catalog pages, however they will experience technical difficulties when trying to access the checkout pages and thus will not be able to place an order.

Recently, Yahoo! has made an improvement to the IP Blocking tool that will allow you to evaluate IP Addresses offline. You can download orders in XML format from the Order Manager, which now includes the IP Addresses of orders. Merchants that have order processing applications outside of Yahoo! now can get the IP Address sent to them in real time through our Real-time Order Delivery integration. From there, the merchant can evaluate the orders with IP Addresses and generate a list or range of IP Addresses that should be flagged or blocked.

Randy Yim
Yahoo! Small Business