Shopify is an online service that enables people to create online shops and conduct ecommerce. It is one of the biggest on the Internet with more than 1 million stores in 175 countries.

These stores are generally very safe to purchase from, but there are scammers targeting this market and the most common scams are:

Scammer Drop Shipping (a.k.a The Triangulation Scam)

The scammers create a Shopify store, apparently selling real products. However, if you place an order they then buy the actual items from a genuine Shopify store using stolen credit cards and the items are shipped to you.

This way the customers get the products and will keep buying. However, the genuine Shopify stores that supply the goods get nothing but trouble when the credit card payments are reversed.  They lose on the product and the payment.

Duplicate Shopify Stores

Scammers find recently created Shopify Stores that appear to sell new products and are successful and they create one with a similar domain name, claiming to sell the same original product. They copy the images and descriptions etc. The scammers either sell cheap copies of the real products or just take the money and disappear.

Fake Payments

A customer makes a purchase on a Shopify store and requests an invoice from PayPal (i.e. outside of Shopify). They claim to be unable to complete the payment because of technical problems on the Shopify store.

The seller sends them a PayPal invoice and receives a notification from PayPal that payment has completed. However the notification is fake – payment has not been made. The seller ships the goods then finds out there was no payment.

Fake Returns

The scammer buys a product from a genuine store then buys a counterfeit or poor quality copy from an illegal seller. She then returns the fake goods to the genuine store using the genuine purchase documents, claiming the quality is not as advertised and demands a refund.

The scammer then has the genuine product and her money back and can repeat the process.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.