Monitoring for Order Anomalies in Shopify

Imagine this…you manage the ecommerce frontend for a well-known multi-national brand. Your store runs on Shopify. You login to the Shopify admin panel one morning and notice a massive spike in orders. Good news? Actually, it’s not.

The first order you look at is for a $500 gift card. You look closely and notice something alarming…the customer was able to buy it for only $7.90. You check another order. Same thing. You spend more time investigating and find thousands of similar orders, all selling for only $7.90.

This is a real scenario that one of our clients found themselves in a few months ago. Ultimately, it was not caused by a bug in Shopify or any of the apps installed, but rather due to human error when configuring a promotion. An update had been made to the conditions of a product collection. That product collection was used in a promotion set up at a third-party app. The update resulted in all products that didn’t have a reduced price being included in the collection, and the promotion set the price for all products in that collection to $7.90. The staff member didn’t notice the problem initially because the app re-calculated pricing overnight on a schedule, not immediately.

After remediation had been completed, Rightpoint and the client both asked the same question: why had so many hours passed between the time when abuse began and website team became aware of the issue, and what could be done to prevent this from happening again? The answer to the question was logical: set up monitoring and alerting to notify Rightpoint and the client in case of irregularities with the orders being placed on the website.

Rightpoint and the client landed on two conditions upon which to trigger alerts:

1. An overall increase in the number of orders being placed

2. Multiple orders being placed with a very high discount percentage.

Rightpoint was tasked to implement this. After some initial research we concluded that this could be done via Shopify’s native Flow capabilities, preventing the need for any additional third-party apps or external systems. Rightpoint set up a number of flows, leveraging shop metafields to track order velocity and discounts.

The flows hook into the Order created trigger and utilize the Send internal email action to trigger an email alert, as well as the Send HTTP request action to create an issue with our Service Desk team.

Fortunately, as of the time of writing this email, the Flows have only triggered during expected events, such as when the client ran a large sale on the website. However, the website team now has peace of mind that should anything odd occur with orders again, we’ll know about it immediately.

Rightpoint has extensive expertise in ecommerce across many platforms and a 24x7x365 service desk to respond to any issue. We’d love to hear from you to discuss and solve your use case.