Block Certain Countries?

[kris0516]

Hi there... I'm new to this whole EJunkie thing... and so far I really like it.



I'm in the process of setting up my website, and I was wondering if there was a way to block certain countries from purchasing products. I offer a service which requires phone calls to my clients, and I only call in the United States and Canada.



I know I can put on my site that we only accept United States and Canadian orders, but most of the time people don't read or "see" that. And because I don't really ask for an address (no shipping) there is no real way to know they are from a different country until they are already in my system and they give me their phone number.



I just thought I would ask on here to see if anyone knew if you could block or just allow payments from certain countries.



Thank you for your help.

Kris

[E-junkie_Ninja]

What you would do is go to Seller Admin>Edit E-junkie Cart Shipping Settings. On the first page, enter in your Shipping Origin information and in the list of Shipping Destinations choose just Canada and the US.



After that you will need to setup each product for shipping/buyer's address. Go to Seller Admin>View/Edit/Delete Product, select a product and click Edit. On the first page enable Shipping/Buyer's Address and then click Next until you can Submit the changes. You will then need to repeat these steps for your other products. At no point do you need to setup shipping charges.



Your buyers will not get charged extra and you can make sure that all your buyers are from the US and Canada.



You can also check with your payment processor and see if they have a way to make sure there are no sale outside of the US and Canada.

[catgirl]

Hi there,



I was wondering if you or PAYPAL can limit the sales for all my products to buyers from US,Canada,NZ,AU and UK. I was actually thinking about a list of allowed countries that is managed globally for my E-Junkie or Paypal account.

[E-junkie_Ninja]

If you use our shipping/buyer's address option you can setup to only sale to buyers from specific countries. To set this up go to Seller Admin>View/Edit/Delete Product, select a product and click Edit. On the first page check the box for Shipping/Buyer's Address and then click Next until you can Submit the changes. you will want to do this for all of your products.



Next go to Seller Admin>Edit E-junkie Cart Shipping Settings. On the left side of the page you can select the countries you want to allow buyers from.

[catgirl]

This is not really helpful. I tried it out and all this does is add a dropdown box with allowed countries and zip code. Because I sell downloads, all they have to do is choose a country, enter any zip code and they can still checkout with paypal. Not really helpful and a hazzle for those in allowed countries.

[landro]

Your best bet is set your .htaccess file to allow visitors from only the countries in which you wish to do business.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Without making the buyer select a country manually, there's really no reliable way to determine what country they're in, so no way to automatically block buyers according to their country. Landro's suggestion would probably rely on GeoIP lookups, which can do a pretty good job of guessing a user's location from their IP, but even that isn't very reliable or consistently accurate.

[catgirl]

What I am doing now is trying the solution E-Junkie Ninja suggested. I will keep monitoring things. Most people seem to enter valid information and a real address. Positive side effect is that the newsletter list gets more real emails.

[mikesay98]

I'd like to revisit this topic. Why do you say there is no way to block buyers according to their country, yet when I get sales info from e-junkie, it lists their IP address and country code? Couldn't we have an option to block sales from a specific country, like we do Transaction IDs or emails?



Because of fraud, I have had to block a couple countries on PayPal but that unfortunately means I lose some sales. It would be easier to have e-junkie block the code deliveries, these people can still make purchases on PayPal, and I can manually email the code to a customer in that country who I know is legitimate. That make sense?

[E-junkie_Monster]

For digital orders all we can get is the buyer's IP address and that's not actually a foolproof way to determine a buyer's location -- especially not if you are concerned about blocking problematic buyers, all they'd need to do to beat your block is use a proxy.

[mikesay98]

True, but if I'm not broadcasting to the world that certain countries can't make instant delivery purchases from me, they may not catch on to the fact that I am doing so. At least by blocking purchases on your end, I can then assess each transaction from that country and make a personal decision on whether or not to fulfill it. Since you do get an IP address (and therefore can determine the country as our ejunkie sales emails show), I think an option to block sales from a specific country should exist, just like blocking transaction IDs or emails. I would think it's the same principle, no?

[landro]

You will never be able to completely eliminate fraud. You just have to suck it up and write it off as a cost of doing business. You can however take a few steps to significantly reduce your risk.



1.Setup PayPal Fraud Management filters to flag, review or deny by Country, Maximum Transaction Amount and/or Unconfirmed Address.



If set to Flag, the transaction still goes through, but it is flagged for your attention.



If set to Review, no code or download is sent until you log into to PayPal to manually approve/accept the transaction. While this defeats the purpose of instant delivery, it gives you a chance to research the buyer and transaction (Order history, IP location vs billing address etc.)



If set to deny, the transaction does not go through and nothing is sent.



Details: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=xpt/Marketing/merchant/RiskControlsOverview-outside



2. Use blocked.com's script to filter traffic based on proxies, countries, bots, language etc. This script has a basic free version and a paid full version for $400. I opted for the features of the full version and it paid for itself within the first few months.



3. Use the Block Buyers/Transactions list in the Seller Admin for known fraudsters.



-Landro

[E-junkie_Guru]

Excellent tips, Landro. As for some sort of IP block at our end, we'll certainly add that suggestion to our Wishlist for consideration as a possible new feature once we finish our new Admin panel that can be modified to add settings necessary to manage such a feature.

[mikesay98]

To follow up on this, the PayPal options aren't really helpful. There is no "review" option, only accept, accept and report, or deny. The first two do nothing to stop fraud, and the third stops legitimate buyers, too. So, PayPal's no help there.



As for using a third party service, that makes this generally more complicated than I need it to be. I don't deal with fraud very often, so I prefer an option that allows me to filter transactions based on IP location, should the need arise.



Lastly, I obviously use the block buyers/transactions option, but that does no good. If a buyer is savvy enough to use a proxy to hide their IP address (as mentioned above as a reason IP blocking wouldn't work), then they are QUITE savvy enough to constantly be changing email addresses they use to conduct their fraud. That would make the process way too REactive, as it is now, which does nothing. I need to be PROactive in my abilities to stop fraud.



As I stated before, I think IP address blocking would be helpful because it would allow the transaction to still take place via PayPal, I would find out from eJunkie it had been blocked, and that would allow me to manually view these transactions and either issue a refund if I don't trust, or manually send a code if I know they are legitimate. In this way, I am able to block questionable sales, but not block trusted buyers.



I would like to point out, I would be more than happy to pay for this option (especially if I had a whole host of fraud options) should it become available. I do recognize the value I get in my low monthly fee with eJunkie, and would be willing to pay a bit more to help my business in the long-run.

[wonderland]

Hello, I am a user from Germany and would like to ask related questions. I have a similar problem as stated above (and on other community pages). Sometimes one user makes an outliert purchase, buying too many products/ paying too much money. Given the instant download of my ebooks, blocking after the purchase does not help me much. I contacted PayPal Germany and totally not in any mood to healp. I cannot block anybody. (The guys said, in Germany you either close your PayPal account or accept everything.)



So my 2 questions:

1- Is there any way to block a certain cart size? I already use the prevent-multiple-additions options. Ideally what I need is that if the fraud buyers buys too much, PayPal inevitably processes, but ejunkie will block or slow down the sending of the link, so that I have time to block the user on ejunkie website. This way I can also prevent this user from making smaller purchases in the future. (I.e., if PayPal does not process a 200eur sale, it does not help me as the user can make 4 purchases of 50eur and I can always react after the download activity.)



2- Is there a way to manually approve the purchases after PayPal's processing? So regardless of what the buyer buys (1 product or 10), PayPal puts the money in my account but ejunkie send out tehlink after my manual approval. Or something like this. I don't mind the extra work because it is very easy to identify outliers for me and the outliers cause me a big headache and I am always online.



I have to say that your product is so much more flexible than PayPal who charges much and does totally not care about sellers. I had clear fraud cases with proof and PayPal just reimbursed the buyers. In any case, thank you for your great product.

[E-junkie_Monster]

If your goal is to prevent buyers from making large single transactions for several items or high quantities that can then be reversed, you could try switching to Buy Now buttons instead of Add to Cart buttons. A Buy Now button only allows one item to go to checkout at a time, so you'd never see another strange outlier order again. And it would be a lot harder for that person to get away with filing several individual disputes via PayPal, and much easier for you to take action if you see someone placing lots of repeat orders from the same address.



Otherwise we don't really have any built in features on limiting orders or delaying delivery. Our main feature is immediate delivery of downloadable products, so we haven't built any features to counteract that.