PayPal has supported some basic risk controls for several years now. The basic risk controls are found under the Selling Preferences heading in your PayPal Profile. They allow you to deny, accept, or accept and report transactions based on several criteria including:

• The country of origin of the transaction
• The amount of the transaction
• Whether or not the transaction was flagged by the PayPal risk model
• Whether or not the Card Verification Value (CVV) code of the card matched
• If an Address Verification Systsm (AVS) of the check was successful

PayPal has recently announced new Advanced Fraud Management Filters (FMF), available to Website Payments Pro customers for an additional $20 / month plus $0.05 / transaction. Advanced FMF includes all the basic filters plus many additional advanced filters. There is also an additional review status that you can use to put any flagged transaction into a pending state. Any pending transaction must be reviewed and accepted before the transaction can be completed. Once activated, you can manage the Advanced FMF by clicking the Fraud Management Filters link under the Selling Preferences heading in your PayPal Profile.

The advanced fraud management filters include several different categories of filters including:

• Additional Credit Card & Address Validation filters
• Checks against high risk databases of zip codes, email domains, IP address ranges, and others
• Transaction data checks for large orders, IP address velocity, and total purchase price

Shopify fully supports the new pending status of a transaction that has been flagged for review by the advanced fraud management filters. Any filter that flags a transaction for review will be displayed with warning message in the Shopify admin interface when you go to capture payment for the order. Shopify will automatically clear the review flag from the order if and when you decide to capture the payment.

Overall, Advanced Fraud Management Filters are an excellent way to custom design an easy to use risk management strategy for your company. They come complete with reports that show the performance rates of your various filters. For more information you can check out the Fraud Management Filters User Guide and The announcement on the PayPal developer blog

Product bulk imports has been updated to help importing go smoother and faster.

We’ve introduced a preview screen which validates that your CSV file you’ve submitted is valid. If Shopify detects any errors, you’ll be notified and given the chance to update and resubmit your import. Nothing’s worse that finding out an hour later that you missed out an important field.

If your CSV file is valid, we will provide you with an estimate of the number of products, SKUs and images Shopify expects to import, and also previews the first product (and it’s variants). This is a way for you to verify that Shopify will import your products in the manner that you expect it to.

We’ve updated the wiki with more information on our Help section for Products.

Bulk Import Preview Screen:

When you mark items as shipped in Shopify, you now have the option of sending out an automatically generated notification to the customer letting them know information about the shipment. If you wait until later to add a tracking number to your shipment, it’s no problem: another email can be automatically sent out with just the new information.

You’ll find a couple of new Liquid templates in your Email & Notifications Preferences screen which can be customized to your heart’s content. The “Shipping confirmation” template is used when you mark items as shipped, and the “Shipping update” template is used when you add a tracking number to a previously created shipment.

By popular demand, today we introduce bulk product import & export to Shopify.

You are now able to export your product database as a csv file and import it back. The CSV file can reference urls to product images which will be automatically downloaded as part of the import process.

See it in action:

We are proud to announce that Shopify is now a certified Google Checkout Advanced Integration (Level 2) shopping cart provider. The advanced integration provides the most features and tightest integration between Shopify and Google Checkout possible. This means that all of your Shopify settings such as shipping rates, taxation settings, and discount codes are fully supported while your customers are checking out with Google Checkout. Other notable Google Checkout features supported by Shopify are Order Management and Risk Assessment.

Google Checkout helps you attract new customers, convert more sales and lower transaction processing costs. Google Checkout is a checkout process that you provide on your website to enable your customers to buy from you quickly and securely, using a single username and password. And once they make a purchase, you can use Checkout to charge their credit cards, process their orders, and receive payment in your bank account. Watch the Google Checkout Seller Demo.

To get started with Google Checkout and Shopify just do the following 4 easy steps:

1. Signup for Shopify
2. Signup for Google Checkout
3. Enter your Google Checkout credentials in Shopify
4. Start Selling!

There’s a new tool at your disposal for rewarding your Shopify store’s valued customers: price-based shipping rates! These rates only become available for orders with a subtotal over a certain specified amount, so you can create all kinds of promotional incentives for the people who buy your products. You could start offering free shipping for any order over $39.99, or maybe advertise a special June-only $5 shipping offer for people spending $9 or more.

You’ll find new links located on your shipping preferences screen to create price-based shipping rates for any countries you want. Enjoy!

We just enabled our new content delivery network for all Basic, Professional and Enterprise Shopify accounts.

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations around the Planet to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is based on proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen and will service the users requests.

This means that Shopify stores should come up almost instantaneously all around the globe. Quick response times have shown to increase the conversion rates in e-commerce and we are bringing this feature to all our subscribers at no additional cost.

Shopify is the only e-commerce system which offers this feature. Take a peek at the ping times from different places. Wikipedia on CDN.

Pixallent released their latest Shopify addon Synctobase.

We’ve built is a little, hosted Ruby on Rails app which uses the Shopify API to sync your products with Google Base. All you need to do is signup for a basesync account and the rest is automated. We check for any changes to your Shopify inventory (add, edit or delete) on a daily basis, then inject them to Google Base. The best part is that it’s completely FREE!

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, they also built Fetch to allow Shopify users to sell digital goods and have them automatically delivered.

Pixallent sure does put their early access to the Shopify API to good use :-)

Shopify now has support for the Australian payment gateweway SecurePay. SecurePay supports processing all the major credit card types including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club, and JCB.

SecurePay also supports merchant accounts with most Australian banks including Advance Bank, ANZ Bank, Bank of Melbourne, Bank of SA, Bank West, Commonwealth Bank, Challenge Bank, National Australia Bank, St George Bank, and Westpac Bank.

Some more information from the SecurePay website:

Combining the latest in internet, telephony and banking network technologies, SecurePay delivers real time secure communications and provides dependable connectivity throughout your company, and its suppliers and customers.

Our strategic alliances with financial institutions and telecommunication carriers has enabled the SecurePay Network to deliver complete 24×7 payment services, including processing of financial transactions in real time through all major banks.

We’re happy to add support for another payment gateway to our Australian customers.

We’ve managed to kick off the first 2 weeks of 2008 with some great enhancements to the Order screen in Shopify.

Localized Address Display

The first enhancement to the orders screen we added is the localized display of addresses. This means that no matter where your customer lives you’ll see the address in the correct format for that country.

Tracking Numbers

The second new feature is the ability to add tracking numbers to orders. The tracking number can be added while you’re marking your items as shipped. If you don’t know the tracking numbers at the time of shipment you can always add the tracking number later. The tracking number will also automatically link to the carrier’s tracking website so you can quickly look up the tracking history of a shipment.

Risk Assessment

The biggest new feature added is the addition of a risk assessment summary.

Credit card providers use several mechanisms for reducing credit card fraud. The first is called the Address Verification System (AVS). AVS compares the numeric portion of the customer’s billing address and zip code to the information on file with the credit card issuer. This helps reduce a significant amount of fraud because thieves are required to also obtain the billing address information for the credit card they’ve stolen. Visa also provides some compelling information in the Merchant Guide to the Visa Address Verification Service.

The second method to reduce credit card fraud is the validation of the credit card’s Card Verification Value (CVV). The CVV is 3 or 4 digit number on the back of the customer’s credit card and helps to ensure that the buyer has the card physically in their possession. The credit card companies also forbid the storage of the CVV code, so credit cards stolen online wouldn’t be useable.

Shopify has been submitting the buyer’s billing address for address verification and has been requiring the CVV code during checkout for a long time now. What was lacking was the presentation of the information. The gathered data is now presented in an easy to view table that either displays a green check for success or detailed information about the failure.

The last piece of the risk assessment is the IP Address check. The IP address check compares the country of the buyer’s billing address to the country the buyer placed the order from. If there is a mismatch then Shopify will issue the warning so that you can investigate the order with the buyer.

The screenshot above shows a very risky order where the CVV code matched the credit card, but the AVS checks and IP address checks failed.

The new Risk Assessment features are designed to help provide the Shopify store owner with all of the information required to quickly and accurately assess the validity of the orders they receive.

Shopify now has support for the SkipJack payment gateway . SkipJack supports both US, and Canadian based merchants, connects to almost all banks in the US, and supports the processing of all major credit cards including VISA, MasterCard, American Express, JCB, Discover and Diner’s Club.

Some more information about “SkipJack” from their homepage:

Skipjack Financial Services was formed in 1997 to meet the needs of both the financial community and their merchants for a secure, affordable, feature-rich payment gateway. Skipjack grew rapidly based on its reputation for service excellence and its ability to meet the needs of merchants of any size with payment solutions designed to meet their specific needs.

Special thanks to Bill Bereza of Atomic Object who contributed the code to to ActiveMerchant.

With our recent push to expand our support for fulfillment services we’ve added support for Fulfillment by Amazon to Shopify.

Amazon says it best with the following from the Fulfillment by Amazon homepage:

Your business should focus on customers and sales – not fulfillment. With this innovative new service, your inventory and orders are processed using the same system used by Amazon.com. When a customer places an order we pick, pack and ship it. No more complicated warehouse and inventory management software. No more worrying about how you’re going to get all those items packed before the pickup time. No more hassles with shipping companies. Just let Amazon do all of it! After 10 years and millions of orders and customers, Amazon has created one of the most advanced fulfillment networks in the world and your business can now benefit from our expertise.