When you’re selling high-value items online, there’s a certain amount of risk involved. You might have a lot of questions when you see a new transaction come through on your site, including:

• Is this a legitimate purchase?
• Is the buyer actually who they say that are?
• Do they have the funds to pay for the order?
• Are you sure they’re not using a stolen credit card?

Identity verification can be an effective solution to verify that the order is legitimate and prevent fraudulent orders from happening in the first place. Don’t take it from us; read on to hear more about Luxus Car Mats.

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Luxus Car Mats sells luxury mats made to order for your vehicle. It isn’t uncommon for their average order total to exceed $1,000.

Luxus Car Mats received an order that triggered high risk with Shopify’s Fraud Risk algorithm. The customer’s billing details didn’t line up with the shipping address details. The customer’s address was even in a different country altogether.

To make matters worse, this was a purchase of over $1,000 USD. It could either be a great sale, or end in a chargeback and end up costing the company.

It’s a gamble to fulfill any order that has mismatching billing and shipping addresses – especially with the order value is high.

The only way to know this order was legitimate was to reach out to the customer to verify their details.

Attempting to verify the customer

To reduce friction at checkout, Shopify and other e-commerce platforms only require the customer to enter in their email and they typically don’t verify the customer’s phone number.

In this case, the customer had provided their phone number and email during checkout.

However, their phone number was invalid. The international code didn’t even match the shipping address of the order.

Phone lookups are a great tool to see the person’s registered name behind a phone number. Details in the phone number like international area code and area code can line up the details of the order.

However, the phone number was incorrectly typed at best, and at worst it was a credit card thief entering in a bogus number.

But how can you tell?

The only point of contact that was valid was the customer’s email.

Saving the order (and the day)

Luxus Car Mats sent an ID check to the customer by email using Real ID.

The ID check was personalized with the customer’s name and order number automatically, and included a message about the order requiring ID verification because it was flagged as high risk.

Within hours, the customer opened the email and their ID photo was captured directly from their mobile phone.

Real ID automatically parsed the name and address from the license, and compared the details against the customer’s order. The billing address and the ID were a match!

Now, Luxus Mats could confidently fulfill the order knowing that they:

1. Had a verified driver’s license matching the credit card address.
2. Had an ID photo on file in case there was a chargeback to prove the customer’s intent to purchase the large order.

Luxus Mats has determined that Real ID has saved them thousands of dollars in potentially lost revenue in cases like these.

To automate this order saving process in the future, Luxus Car Mats set up triggers in Real ID to automatically verify orders over $300 or flagged as high risk by Shopify.

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Order ID verification is a small step you can take to make a huge impact on the health of your business. Get started with Real ID for free on your Shopify or Woocommerce store today.