For a couple of years I've offered my craft fair vending checklist as a free resource. I just took the free option away, and I think it's important to share why.
The checklist is a PDF, so a digital download. Until today I had made it available at two price tiers: free for people with fragile finances, and a few dollars for people with more robust safety nets.
I set it up this way for several reasons. One is that I want people visiting my site to reflect on their relative financial situation and wider equity issues. Also, delivering the document this way seemed like a good way to test a plugin I was considering for delivering other digital products. And it would mean that people downloading the document would interact with my site's checkout flow, asking them if they want to subscribe to my newsletter or add a tip to support my activism.
But over the last couple of months, I've been noticing a very odd trend in orders for this product. See if you can spot it (the strikethroughs are from me cancelling the orders).
First of all, it's a bunch of dude names. I know far fewer men who are craft fair vendors than women. The large majority of customers at my feminist business are also women-identifying. So these names stand out.
Secondly, the orders are for weird quantities. They often aren't downloading a single copy, like you'd expect, for an actual fellow vendor wanting to use the resource. They are ordering multiples: 5, 10, even 18 at a time, for a total of $0.
The conversation details show that the web hits come directly from URLs like these:
- /checkouts/cn/hWN97Gzqq4pSoFCa6gtkjDVp/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNCz4bhfgRgDqZ1Vm4TWKam/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNDnGWkdoHebc8HlLOsO7tw/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNGB3sb9NieTjsxFlorAzbU/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNGB3yJuiplzmxJQHK8LYWe/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNGBSrECbhkKmi4gIHkMvVC/en-us
-
/checkouts/cn/hWNGCgOkYETowcbudNxKzXx2/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNH33YWCEH6k26bGwvefqdd/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNH340KmlWHLh5YuibwuKQb/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNH4Bz4biEunxU7S5yv3cXq/en-us
- /checkouts/cn/hWNH4GDKGhkPDRUgrKJmVf98/en-us
So it appears they are not actually visiting my home page or a specific product, but going straight to a checkout URL, using a 24-digit string that increases over time.
On the surface, Shopify doesn't seem to flag the order as risky, saying “analysis not available.”
But if I click into “About this Order,” I can see some more info including red flags. For the majority, "a high risk internet connection (web proxy) was used to place the order."
While for others, the country doesn't match:
My best guess is that these are tests to try stolen credit cards against the cheapest item in my shop. Except that the cheapest item turns out to be something that costs nothing, so I guess mercifully there's no low-value transaction to get chargebacks which could cause me real fees. But the fraud orders still clutter up my records and make it harder for me to see actual orders. Not to mention the ick of the entitled scammers not caring about the impact on a small business like mine.
Because I receive a higher volume of fraudulent orders for this item than actual downloads, I have to do something. I don't have the staff power to weed out multiple fraudulent transactions a day.
I run my store on Shopify, a platform that I chose before the rise of AI. A few months ago, Shopify informed shop owners that it would start making our content searchable by AI agents. There was no way to opt out. I don't know for certain that this fraud is AI related, but agentic storefronts were announced in March and I only started receiving these in late February, after several years on the platform with nothing like this before.
Regardless, the real question is what can I do about it. So here is what I am trying: I'm bumping the formerly free option up to $5, and the formerly paid option up to $10. This PDF will no longer be the cheapest item in my shop, so we'll see what happens. Will the problem shift to a different product? Will cards actually get charged causing me a new headache and financial cost?
I'm curious to hear from other business owners who use Shopify—are you running into this problem or a similar one with your lowest priced product? Do you have any theories, and what are you doing about it?