Bot-driven card testing floods small stores with fraudulent orders and refund fees, with no real platform safeguard

Summary

Small store owners on Shopify and similar platforms are being hit by automated bot attacks that run 50–250 credit-card attempts until one card clears, generating real fraudulent orders on their most expensive products. The merchant's only defense — cancelling and refunding, or installing a fraud-filter app like Flow — costs money on every single attempt ($0.81–$1 per refund) and does nothing to stop the next wave; changing checkout to multiple pages fails within hours. Merchants describe being completely exposed: the platform offers no other solution, there is no way to block card-testing traffic pre-checkout without harming legitimate conversion, and no way to distinguish a tester from a real customer. The consequences compound into existential risk for high-risk-adjacent sellers: each successful test order is a future chargeback, and rising dispute/chargeback ratios are exactly what triggers processor reserves, freezes and account terminations (the 'decline file' outcome). No product currently solves the core problem of stopping card-testing at the point of order creation while keeping the checkout frictionless, and platforms structurally decline accountability, leaving an unsolved, high-anxiety gap that merchants would readily pay to close.