Here’s what most Shopify merchants don’t realize about the risk indicators on every order: a program that looks fantastic on chargebacks can be suppressing your approval rate and your revenue in the background.
Approving a fraudster hurts. Rejecting a legitimate customer hurts just as much, and nobody puts that number in the Monday dashboard. If you’re a Shopify brand heading into BFCM with orders sitting in the gray zone (shipping and billing don’t match, a new device, a first purchase north of $1,000, an international address), this episode on false declines and ecommerce fraud prevention is for you. If you’re newer and running on Shopify Payments with Shopify Protect, you’ll learn exactly where that coverage stops.
Trevor Miller is a Senior Account Executive at ClearSale, the fraud prevention company now part of Experian, which has spent more than two decades pairing machine learning with secondary human review to approve the orders other systems decline. One case study he points to on air: Tactical Sports Gear left ClearSale for Shopify’s built-in tools, started selling $1,000-plus items, and ate thousands in fraud losses. They came back to ClearSale and now run a 99.4% approval rate with a 0% current chargeback rate.
In this conversation, Trevor breaks down the decision accuracy framework: the one question to ask any fraud vendor, the simple math that turns one percentage point of approvals into up to $200,000 at $20M in sales, why Shopify Protect only covers US-based merchants on eligible Shop Pay orders, and what to look at in January once the holiday orders catch up with you. If you sell higher-ticket goods, ship internationally, or cancel more “risky” orders than you’d like, this is the playbook for saying yes to more good customers safely. And if you’re a small store with minimal fraud, Trevor will tell you straight up that you might not need it.
Let’s dive in. 👇
✅ The question most merchants can’t answer but should: Trevor says brands can tell him their chargeback rate much faster than their false decline rate, and you’ll hear why that gap tells him everything about where the revenue is hiding.
✅ What a Shopify “high risk” flag actually means: Not proof of fraud, and not a reason to cancel on autopilot. Trevor explains how to treat the flag as a signal for more scrutiny, and the one question to ask about every order you’ve been canceling.
✅ Where Shopify Protect stops covering you: Steve learned something new preparing for this episode about who qualifies for Shopify Protect, and it changes the math for Canadian brands and anyone else based outside the US.
✅ The traveling customer problem: A legitimate buyer on a different IP, shipping somewhere new, on a high-value first purchase looks exactly like a fraudster to a traditional model. You’ll hear how ClearSale works to prove who that person actually is instead of saying no.
✅ What changes when you can’t use Shopify Payments: CBD, cannabis, alcohol, some supplements. If you’re on Authorize.net or another third-party gateway, Trevor walks through the extra layers you need to understand before peak season.
✅ Why January is the report card month: The consequences of a holiday order don’t land on the day you approve it. Trevor shares the questions he’d ask in January instead of patting everyone on the back for December sales.
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Steve opens with something most merchants never think about: when you turn on Shopify Payments, Stripe processes the payment behind the scenes, and then Shopify layers its own risk scoring on top using data it doesn’t publicly discuss. The result is that little green, yellow, or red bar on every order. The natural assumption is “Shopify handles fraud, so fraud is handled.” Trevor’s response is that Shopify gives you genuinely useful tools, but the question isn’t whether your orders are being screened. It’s how accurately you separate good customers from bad ones, and what an incorrect decision in either direction costs you.
From there, the conversation gets into the gray area where false declines live. Mismatched addresses, a large order, a new device, a customer buying from one country and shipping to another. Trevor’s point is that none of those things make someone a criminal, and the easiest fraud strategy in the world (decline anything unusual) also stops revenue. He walks Steve through the traveling-customer example, where a legitimate buyer trips every traditional alarm, and explains how ClearSale’s combination of technology and secondary human review is built for exactly that order, not a binary yes or no. You’ll also hear his honest answer when Steve asks why anyone would pay ClearSale when Shopify Protect is free on eligible Shop Pay orders, including the eligibility detail Steve says he only learned that morning after 20 years in commerce.
The back half is where the money shows up. Trevor keeps the math simple: at $20M in online sales, one percentage point of improved legitimate approvals can add up to $200,000 in additional order value moving through the funnel. He shares the Tactical Sports Gear story, where the owner said he earned back what he was paying for ClearSale in approved orders alone. Steve pushes into the questions his listeners are asking right now: what onboarding looks like in Shopify (Trevor has had entire dev teams of four or five people conclude “this could have been an email”), the one thing to turn off before you go live, what changes for regulated brands on a third-party gateway, and what the January “report card” looks like once returns, “I don’t recognize this charge” disputes, and chargebacks from November and December arrive at once.
It ends with the $100 bill. If you knew you’d lost one, would you pay someone $5 to retrace your steps and bring back $95? That’s the whole episode in one question, and it’s a blueprint for capturing revenue from customers who already showed up, added to cart, and hit checkout.
👉 Measure the decision funnel, not just the chargeback rate. Trevor’s test is simple: if you can quote your chargeback rate instantly but need to “follow up by email” on your false decline rate, you’re only watching half the problem. Count checkout attempts blocked, orders reaching fraud analysis, orders approved, and orders canceled for risk. Then look at what those canceled customers did next: contacted support, tried a different card, or quietly disappeared. Steve’s tip for the AI-friendly crowd is to connect Shopify’s MCP server to ChatGPT or Claude and query those numbers directly.
👉 A high-risk flag is a reason to investigate, not a verdict. Shopify itself gives you options on a high-risk order: verify it, cancel it, or refund it. Auto-canceling everything questionable means you’re optimizing around fear of fraud instead of decision accuracy. Trevor’s question for every merchant is this: of all the orders you’re currently canceling as high risk, how many would you want back if someone could establish they were legitimate? That’s recovered revenue sitting inside your fraud queue.
👉 Know exactly where Shopify Protect ends before BFCM starts. Protect applies only if you’re based in the US with a US Shopify Payments account, and only to Shop Pay orders for physical goods that ship with valid tracking within seven days. If you’re a Canadian or international brand, or you’re in a regulated category that forced you onto a third-party gateway like Authorize.net, you’re outside that umbrella entirely. Trevor’s advice for the gateway crowd: understand which layer is making the fraud decision, what data it has, and who owns the chargeback process.
👉 Evaluate vendors on fraud rate at a given approval rate, never fraud rate alone. A 0% fraud rate is easy if you decline everyone. At $20M in sales, Trevor’s math says each point of legitimate approval is worth up to $200,000 before fulfillment and returns. Tactical Sports Gear, per ClearSale’s published case study, is running 99.4% approvals with a 0% current chargeback rate after coming back from Shopify’s native tools. Ask any prospective vendor for both numbers together.
👉 Don’t buy a fraud tool you don’t need, and don’t stack two of them. Trevor says it directly: a small store with low average order value, minimal fraud, and an occasional review that doesn’t eat up your time might not need ClearSale. His interest starts when chargebacks climb, auto-cancellations grow, your approval rate worries you, or you sell high-value or highly resellable goods (tactical, automotive, THC, CBD, novelty, anything behind an age gate). If you do add ClearSale, turn off other outside fraud tools so you don’t get one system saying “good” and another saying “bad” on the same order.
👉 Grade your holiday in January, not on Cyber Monday. Everything gets noisier in Q4: new customers, gifts shipped to unfamiliar addresses, travelers, pressure to fulfill fast. Fraudsters know you’re distracted. The consequences land weeks later as returns, disputes, and chargebacks, each with its own evidence window. Trevor’s January checklist: What was our approval rate? How much fraud did we let through? How many legitimate customers did we reject? Did our fraud operations scale without adding customer friction? Your real holiday number is profitable approved revenue after the risk catches up.
Trevor Miller
Senior Account Executive, ClearSale
Trevor Miller works directly with Shopify and ecommerce merchants at ClearSale, the fraud prevention company that joined Experian and has spent more than two decades refining a hybrid model: machine learning for the clear decisions, and a second layer of advanced human review for the ambiguous ones. His day-to-day is the conversation this episode is built on: sitting with prospective merchants to find their approval rate alongside their fraud rate and show them what the gap is worth.
What stands out in this conversation is how often Trevor talks merchants out of buying. He’ll tell a small store with minimal fraud that it probably doesn’t need ClearSale, and he won’t suggest duplicating something Shopify Protect already does well. His focus is narrower and more valuable: orders in the gray area, brands that fall outside Shopify Protect’s eligibility, and regulated sellers on third-party gateways who need to understand every layer of their payment architecture.
For Shopify merchants heading into peak season, that gives you a clear-eyed read on where built-in tools are enough and where legitimate revenue is being labeled as risk.
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Steve Hutt: Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I’m your host, Steve Hutt. If you’re listening today, there’s a good chance your store runs on Shopify and has Shopify Payments turned on. That’s the default for many merchants. A lot of people don’t realize that Stripe is the payment processor and business partner working behind the scenes. It processes the payment and typically passes an approval back to Shopify. Shopify then scores the order using its own internal data. They don’t really talk about everything that goes into that risk analysis, but they have data that’s different from what Stripe uses for a general authorization. Every order has an associated fraud risk, and you can see those green, yellow, and red indicators in your admin. Then you have to decide what to do. That’s why we’re recording today. Many brands assume Shopify handles fraud, and they make decisions based only on what they see in the order. But there’s more to consider than whether an order is flagged as high-risk. Think about the chargebacks that can happen. Shopify has a feature called Shopify Protect, but that protection doesn’t always apply. That’s why my guest is here today. His name is Trevor Miller, and he’s a Senior Account Executive at ClearSale. You can find them at clear.sale. They have a Shopify app, and it’s interesting how they connect to our ecosystem. They’re also part of Experian following an acquisition a little while ago. I’m hoping we can unpack what’s happening in ecommerce fraud protection. The key question is whether we can make more money. What can we do with those orders in the middle, where accepting them is a judgment call, and you’re nervous about shipping? With high-risk orders, you probably won’t accept them at all. ClearSale approaches this through the lens of additional revenue. You have these orders, but are you approving them? ClearSale combines its data with human review to help approve legitimate orders and protect against fraud chargebacks. Trevor, that was a long introduction, but welcome to eCommerce Fastlane.
Trevor Miller: Thank you so much, Steve. I’m happy to be here.
Steve Hutt: This is really cool. I mentioned it in the introduction, but what do most merchants assume is happening with fraud once they turn on Shopify Payments?
Trevor Miller: I think the natural assumption is, “I’ve turned on Shopify Payments. Shopify is analyzing fraud, so fraud is basically handled.” Shopify gives merchants genuinely useful tools. It analyzes transactions, surfaces risk indicators, and tells you whether an order appears to be low-, medium-, or high-risk. Merchants sometimes miss the nuance: fraud prevention isn’t just about catching fraud. It’s also about making the right decisions on good customers. A fraud system can cost you money. In two ways. One is obvious: you approve a fraudster. The other is almost invisible: you reject a legitimate customer.
Steve Hutt: I see.
Trevor Miller: That second number is the one I want merchants to start asking about. You can have a fraud program that looks fantastic on chargebacks while suppressing approval rates and revenue in the background. The question isn’t simply, “Is Shopify screening my orders?” It is. The better question is, “How accurately are we separating good customers from bad ones, and what is an incorrect decision costing us overall?”
Steve Hutt: We hear about false declines a lot, and I’ve experienced them myself. An order isn’t approved, but you have no idea why. I know my card security code is correct. I know my billing address matches my shipping address. All the basic information looks right, so why is it being declined? Is that something you deal with, and how do you approach it?
Trevor Miller: Absolutely. First, I’d separate two things merchants often lump together. You can have a payment decline, where the issuer or payment processor doesn’t authorize the transaction. You can also have a fraud decision, where a legitimate customer or order gets treated as too risky. Those aren’t necessarily the same problem. On the fraud side, false declines tend to happen in the gray area. Maybe the billing and shipping addresses don’t match. Maybe it’s an unusually large order. Maybe someone is buying from one country and shipping to another, or they’re using a new device. There are a lot of possibilities, but none of them automatically makes someone a fraudster.
Steve Hutt: Yeah.
Trevor Miller: That’s why we care so much about context. The easiest fraud strategy in the world is to decline anything that looks unusual. You’ll stop fraud, but you’ll also stop revenue. The hard part is saying yes safely and confidently. That’s where ClearSale’s combination of machine learning and secondary human review becomes important. We’re trying to understand the ambiguous order rather than treating unusual and fraudulent as synonyms.
Steve Hutt: When Shopify flags an order as high-risk, merchants may see a recommendation to cancel it, and chargeback protection may not be available. Outside of using ClearSale, what do you suggest merchants do with an order like that? Do they take Shopify’s recommendation and cancel it, or do they decide otherwise? We talked before recording about how some merchants think, “It looks pretty good to me, and I need the revenue.”
Trevor Miller: Exactly. I wouldn’t tell a merchant to blindly ship it, but I also wouldn’t say a red flag equals automatic cancellation. Shopify gives merchants multiple options for high-risk orders, including verifying the order, canceling it, or refunding it. I’d treat that flag as a signal that the order deserves more scrutiny.
Steve Hutt: I see.
Trevor Miller: It’s not proof that the customer is a criminal. That’s a philosophical difference. If you automatically cancel every questionable order, you’re optimizing around fear of fraud. If you investigate intelligently, you’re optimizing around decision accuracy and customer experience. At ClearSale, the hybrid approach matters most in those risky cases. Technology can identify patterns and risk, while cases needing additional scrutiny can go through advanced human review. My question for a merchant would be, “Of all the orders you’re canceling because they’re high-risk, how many would you want back if we could establish that they were legitimate?” That’s potentially recoverable revenue sitting in your fraud queue.
Steve Hutt: How do you figure out how many good orders are being turned away? You can see orders in your Shopify admin, or you may be sending them to a 3PL. But you still need a checkpoint to review your orders and their Shopify risk flags. How do we know how many legitimate orders we’re turning away? That sounds like the opportunity ClearSale addresses.
Trevor Miller: This is one of my favorite questions because most merchants can tell me their chargeback rate much faster than their false decline rate. With the false decline rate, it’s usually, “I’ll follow up and get that to you in an email.” That tells you something. Start by measuring the entire decision funnel. How many checkout attempts are blocked or declined? How many orders reach fraud analysis? How many are approved?
Steve Hutt: Fair enough.
Trevor Miller: How many are canceled or rejected for risk? Then look at what happens to those customers afterward. Do they contact support? Do they try again? Do they use a different payment method? Do known repeat customers suddenly disappear? If you’re comparing fraud solutions, don’t just ask who has the lowest fraud rate. Ask what approval rate they’re achieving alongside it. Fraud rates without approval rates can be misleading.
Steve Hutt: Right.
Trevor Miller: Here’s the example I like to use, with simple numbers for the sake of the math. If you’re processing $20 million online and improve legitimate approvals by just one percentage point, that’s up to $200,000 in additional order value moving through the funnel before considering fulfillment, returns, and other downstream economics. That’s why I want merchants measuring revenue protected and revenue recovered, not just fraud blocked.
Steve Hutt: For the AI-friendly people listening, Shopify also has an MCP server. If you’re using ChatGPT or Claude, you can connect to your Shopify store and query the kinds of information you just mentioned. You need those data points, and I think you’d be surprised by what you find when you start working through the data.
Trevor Miller: Absolutely.
Steve Hutt: It’s wild what’s happening with AI right now. Let’s talk about what happens with some of these orders. Beyond the risk flags, Shopify has Shopify Protect. I believe it covers fraud chargebacks on eligible Shop Pay orders. Many people use Shop Pay because they like the Shop app for tracking orders and the one-click checkout experience, where their credit card and billing information are saved. Shop Pay and the Shop app work well together. What’s happening with Shopify Protect, and how is it different from ClearSale? I believe Shopify Protect is free for eligible Shop Pay orders, whereas ClearSale has a fee.
Trevor Miller: That’s a great question. I wish more prospects would ask me that. I wouldn’t tell anyone to buy ClearSale to duplicate something Shopify already does well. Shopify Protect is valuable, but it has a limited scope.
Steve Hutt: Fair enough.
Trevor Miller: Eligible orders are protected based on requirements around the payment method, physical goods, and fulfillment. It’s less effective when those variables fall outside what Shopify expects. The example I use is a legitimate customer who’s traveling. Their IP location is different from where they usually shop, they’re shipping somewhere other than their billing address, and it’s a high-value first purchase.
Steve Hutt: Right.
Trevor Miller: From a traditional fraud model’s perspective, those are reasons to be suspicious. The order may be flagged or ultimately declined. ClearSale’s value proposition is broader. We improve decision-making across orders, especially those in the gray area, while protecting revenue. In that scenario, ClearSale works to determine whether I am who I say I am. We analyze the available transaction and behavioral data using our technology, rules, historical intelligence, and many other signals. Where appropriate, a riskier transaction moves into secondary review rather than simply being rejected as fraud.
Steve Hutt: Yeah.
Trevor Miller: Our goal is to work as hard as possible to approve more orders by establishing whether they’re legitimate. That’s more than stopping fraud. It’s retaining a customer who’s willing to spend $5,000 on one order. That’s the economic conversation merchants should be having: how much legitimate revenue is being labeled as a risk? ClearSale’s integration architecture is designed around that combined approach: risk assessment, automated decision-making, and advanced review for riskier cases, rather than relying only on a binary automated screen.
Steve Hutt: I researched Shopify Protect before recording because I wanted to understand what it does. I have a lifelong-learning mindset, and I’ve been working in commerce for about 20 years. One thing I learned today is that Shopify Protect covers U.S. merchants with U.S. Shopify Payments accounts and has requirements around physical goods, shipping, and tracking. That’s the scope of where it works. One difference I’ve noted with ClearSale is that it’s useful for brands operating outside Shopify Protect’s geographic eligibility. You can cover orders beyond that scope. International sales can introduce more risk. Shipping from the U.S. to Canada might be less complicated, given that we’re trading partners, whatever Trump may think right now. Many American companies ship into Canada, and vice versa. But when you get further into international orders, you start dealing with carriers, delivery verification, and porch pirates. It can get complicated. That international reach seems to be another benefit of ClearSale that you don’t get from Shopify Protect.
Trevor Miller: Absolutely.
Steve Hutt: The other thing I want to discuss is what happens when a merchant says, “I want more revenue.” We’re in the pre-BFCM period, and people are developing their strategies and tactics. They have their inventory, they know their promotions, and they know buyers are coming. Statistics on holiday spending are already coming in. People are buying early because selection is good and they’re seeing 20% or 30% off, compared with perhaps 40% during BFCM. Shoppers are being trained to buy early, but a large audience is still coming. What are you telling merchants right now? Can ClearSale help generate more approvals and revenue from those marginal orders they’d otherwise hesitate to ship, or from high-risk orders they’d normally cancel? What does that mean for the bottom line when too many buyers are already coming to the store?
Trevor Miller: I’ve got three different thoughts going through my head. That’s a big question.
Steve Hutt: I know. There’s a lot going on right now.
Trevor Miller: Can ClearSale help? Absolutely. One example that comes to mind is a brand we’ve worked with where I can put a real dollar figure on what we did. It’s a public case study on our site: Tactical Sports Gear.
Steve Hutt: Yeah.
Trevor Miller: They had used ClearSale previously, then moved their store to Shopify and thought Shopify’s integrated fraud protection would be enough. They started adding higher-ticket products, including items over $1,000, and fraud became a problem. According to the case study, they experienced thousands of dollars in fraud losses, so they came back to ClearSale. The results were compelling, with an approval rate around 99% and a reported current chargeback rate of 0%. My favorite part wasn’t the fraud number, though. It was what the owner said: he earned back in approved orders what he was paying for ClearSale. The integration paid for itself in recovered revenue. That’s the question I want merchants to consider before BFCM and these major shopping periods. Fraud prevention shouldn’t just be an insurance policy or a cost center. If we’re doing our job right, we’re protecting the downside and helping the merchant capture legitimate revenue on the upside.
Steve Hutt: That’s amazing. These people are already coming to your store. If you can convert more marginal orders you would otherwise cancel, or avoid false declines by running those orders through ClearSale, you can generate more revenue without spending more to acquire customers. They’ve already arrived at your website, they’re ready to buy, they’ve added to their cart, and they’re checking out. Not everybody is a criminal. That’s where your network fits in, particularly when you’re outside Shopify Protect’s coverage.
Trevor Miller: Absolutely.
Steve Hutt: What happens when someone connects ClearSale? I noticed you have a Shopify app, but merchants don’t want to disrupt the customer experience or checkout flow. Can you explain what happens when someone decides to try ClearSale on their Shopify store? Are there onboarding steps? I haven’t added it to a demo store myself, so I don’t know what the settings look like or how much happens in the background. Is there reporting afterward to show the upside from ClearSale? It would be useful to understand the baseline before activation and compare it with what happens afterward. I’m curious about installing the app, whether historical orders are brought in, and what the analytics look like moving forward.
Trevor Miller: It’s straightforward. I’ve had conversations with entire development teams where four or five people joined to discuss the integration. After I walked them through it, they said, “This could have been an email.” Essentially, a prospective merchant talks with me, and we agree on terms.
Steve Hutt: That’s perfect. I love that.
Trevor Miller: Once the agreement is returned to ClearSale and I activate things on our side, our system automatically generates credentials to log in to the application. You log in and can change those credentials. Then there’s a configuration phase where you’re connected with our implementation team. They discuss your workflow and where you want fraud analysis to sit, whether that’s after capture, before authorization, or elsewhere in the flow. They make sure everything is running, and then you’re ready to go. One thing I’d recommend is turning off other outside fraud tools so you don’t get conflicting messages. If one tool says an order is good and another says it’s bad, that creates more confusion. Our implementation and integration team will walk you through the entire process. They’re very capable.
Steve Hutt: What about merchants who can’t use Shopify Payments? That comes up quite a bit. Shopify supports certain regulated markets, such as CBD, cannabis, alcohol, and some supplements, but payment approval can be a different matter. Stripe can be particular about supplements and requirements from Health Canada or the Food and Drug Administration. That doesn’t necessarily mean those products can’t be sold online, but the merchant may need a third-party gateway, such as Authorize.net. How do you connect to that kind of setup?
Trevor Miller: You’re asking what changes for a Shopify brand that can’t use Shopify Payments and needs a third-party gateway?
Steve Hutt: That’s correct.
Trevor Miller: This is where merchants need to look closely at their architecture rather than assuming every Shopify fraud feature works the same way. Shopify supports third-party payment providers, but it specifically tells merchants to check fraud-analysis limitations with their processor.
Steve Hutt: Right.
Trevor Miller: Shopify Protect also has payment-method eligibility requirements, so now you have multiple layers to understand. Shopify is your ecommerce platform, your gateway or processor handles the payment, and you need to know where fraud decisions happen, what data is available, who owns the chargeback process, and what protections apply. That’s a natural environment for ClearSale because we’re not trying to be your payment processor. We’re answering a different question: “Should I trust this order, and can I confidently fulfill it?” ClearSale supports different integration flows depending on the merchant’s payment architecture, including analysis before or after payment authorization. Moving away from Shopify Payments doesn’t eliminate fraud prevention. It makes understanding each layer’s responsibilities even more important. You need to be that much more aware of what’s happening in your store.
Steve Hutt: That’s interesting. I don’t want to get into doom and gloom, but I used to joke about this when I worked in retail. After the holidays, there might be an extended return policy through January 7 or 8. People could shop early and still return items after Christmas. We used to call it National Return Day. Around Boxing Day and afterward, people start looking at their credit card statements and asking, “What’s this? I didn’t order that.” It can go down an ugly path. I’ve seen it firsthand through working with brands at Shopify. Revenue is high in November and December, but January arrives, statements come in, and some people dispute things they legitimately ordered. Handling those disputes is a lot of work. Can you walk us through what merchants should expect in January and how ClearSale can help?
Trevor Miller: I call January the report-card month for the decisions you made in November and December. During Black Friday and the holidays, everything gets noisier. Traffic goes up, carts and abandoned carts go up, engagement goes up, and order velocity increases.
Steve Hutt: Yeah.
Trevor Miller: You have more new customers. People ship gifts to addresses that aren’t their own. Customers travel, normal order behavior changes, and teams are under pressure to fulfill quickly. Fraudsters know merchants are handling that volume, so they try to hit them when they’re distracted. Then January arrives, the report card comes in, and another layer appears.
Steve Hutt: Right.
Trevor Miller: Returns, refund requests, unrecognized charges, merchandise disputes, and fraud chargebacks. It’s a giant headache. The important point is that the consequences of a holiday transaction don’t necessarily appear on the day you approve it. I wish they did. That would make things easier. Disputes have their own downstream timeline.
Steve Hutt: Yeah.
Trevor Miller: Shopify notes that merchants generally have a limited window to submit evidence once a chargeback is filed, and the card company’s review can continue for weeks afterward. In January, I wouldn’t just look at December sales, declare it a great holiday season, and congratulate everyone. I’d look back and ask, “What was our approval rate? How much fraud did we let through?”
Steve Hutt: Yeah.
Trevor Miller: How many legitimate customers did we reject? What’s happening with chargebacks, returns, and disputes from those holiday customers? Did our fraud operations scale without creating customer friction? Your real holiday performance isn’t gross sales on Cyber Monday. It’s profitable, approved revenue after the risk catches up.
Steve Hutt: That’s great advice, and I think it’s the takeaway for today. There’s a real opportunity here. I love the report-card analogy, and it’s not just about January. ClearSale has your back, but merchants need to understand that the success they see over the next few months has downstream consequences. Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, has been talking about growth and the outlook for brands. Shopify’s second-quarter financials were impressive, and its third-quarter results are coming up. It’ll be interesting to see how AI and AI-assisted conversions contribute. Agentic commerce is another whole conversation.
Trevor Miller: We don’t have enough time.
Steve Hutt: Buying me a coffee is about the simplest example I can think of for agentic commerce. In any case, this has been eye-opening. I’m on my second page of notes, and I’ve learned a lot. That’s why I wanted you on today. Everyone is looking for strategies and tactics to maximize conversion rates, but they may not realize that technology like ClearSale can improve the bottom line.
Trevor Miller: Absolutely.
Steve Hutt: That improvement comes from several places, including converting sales you’d otherwise hesitate to approve or decline outright. That’s incremental revenue. What do you think the next steps are for listeners? Is there a sweet spot for the type of merchant you work with, or is this available to anyone on Shopify? It would clearly have more impact at a larger GMV, but is it accessible to everyone, and is turning it on an obvious decision?
Trevor Miller: We work with the full range of merchants, from mom-and-pop shops selling duck-shaped soaps out of their garage to some of the largest companies in the world. But if you’re a small Shopify merchant with relatively low volume, a low average order value, minimal fraud, very few questionable orders, and occasional reviews that don’t take much time, you might not need us. We’re not the best fit for everybody, and I won’t push something on someone who doesn’t need it. I don’t think every merchant should buy another fraud tool just because it exists. It needs to make business and economic sense.
Steve Hutt: Fair enough.
Trevor Miller: I start becoming interested when one or more things happen: you’re getting more chargebacks, you’re automatically canceling more orders, or your approval rate concerns you. You might be selling high-value or highly resellable goods, or working in categories such as tactical products, automotive, THC, CBD, or novelty products. Products behind an age gate are generally considered high-risk.
Steve Hutt: We chatted before recording, and you’ve kindly offered a listener-only promotion for people interested in learning more about ClearSale. Can you talk about the 10% discount? I have a special link I’ll include in the show notes.
Trevor Miller: Absolutely. I’ll keep it simple. I believe in KISS: keep it simple, silly. Go to the link in the show notes. We’ve put together something specifically for eCommerce Fastlane listeners. Even if you’re not sure you need ClearSale, I’d encourage you to do at least one thing after this conversation: look at your approval rate.
Steve Hutt: Yeah.
Trevor Miller: Look at it alongside your fraud rate. If you don’t know how many legitimate customers you’re turning away, that’s the number you should find. The goal isn’t to decline more orders and say no to everything. It’s to make better decisions, approve more good customers, and keep the bad ones out.
Steve Hutt: I’ll include that link in the show notes. It’s straightforward. You fill in your information, including your name, phone number, website, and platform. You or someone on your team will review it and schedule a conversation about approval rates, fraud rates, and those basic data points. From there, you can discuss next steps.
Trevor Miller: Exactly.
Steve Hutt: The cost is relatively small, and you made a great comment before recording that would be a good way to close. If someone loses a $100 bill, are they willing to spend a little money to help find it?
Trevor Miller: Absolutely. The example was this: if you lost a $100 bill and knew you’d lost it, would you pay someone $5 to retrace your steps and figure out where it went? They come back a little later and say, “I found your $100 bill. Here’s $95. I’ll keep the $5. Have a nice day.”
Steve Hutt: That’s the incrementality I’m talking about. A small payment to ClearSale can help recover revenue that would otherwise be lost. You’ve got about 25 years of engineering behind this, proprietary technology, and a lot of industry kudos for what you’re building, and thank you for being part of the Shopify ecosystem. With almost three million merchants, there’s a lot of opportunity beyond what Shopify’s native tools and Shopify Protect offer. That’s part of today’s education: understanding those middle-ground orders and how better approval rates can help GMV. This has been excellent. Trevor, thanks for joining me and recording today. I really appreciate it.
Trevor Miller: Absolutely. Thank you, Steve. Thanks for inviting me. This has been fun.
Steve Hutt: Have a great afternoon.
