How do I install CustomerGenius in my Shopify store?

Click Install app in the Shopify App Store and approve the requested permissions. Our onboarding wizard opens automatically inside Shopify Admin, guiding you through setting your fraud detection thresholds and running a one-time data sync across your last 60 days of orders. Most merchants are fully configured in under 10 minutes.

Does CustomerGenius start refunding orders the moment I install it?

No — auto-refund is disabled by default, so you're always in control. During onboarding you set the fraud score threshold at which orders are flagged. You can choose to manually review flagged orders for a period to build confidence in the scoring, or enable automatic refunds right away. Either way, you'll receive an email notification each time a suspicious order is detected.

What signals feed the fraud score?

CustomerGenius checks every new order against all previous orders that used the same discount code. It compares email addresses, phone numbers, billing addresses, shipping addresses (both exact and fuzzy matching), and customer names. Each field that matches a prior order adds points to the fraud score. Fuzzy matching catches small variations like transposed letters or different address formats that a simple exact match would miss.

Can CustomerGenius detect abuse across a family of similar codes (e.g. SAVE10, SAVE20, SAVE30)?

Yes — this is what cross-evaluation discount groups solve. Add codes to the monitored list individually, or use a wildcard like SAVE* to group an entire family of codes into a single eligibility pool. CustomerGenius then scores incoming orders using any code in the group against prior orders using any other code in the group. It's the right setting when customers rotate through different codes from the same campaign to dodge per-code limits.

Does CustomerGenius work with order tags as well as discount codes?

Yes. Some promotions don't flow through a discount code — gift-with-purchase, BFCM offers tagged at the order level, influencer flags, and so on. Add the tag to the monitored list in settings and CustomerGenius applies the same identity-based abuse detection it uses for discount codes. Wildcard prefixes work for tags too, so you can group whole families of campaign tags together.

Can different discount codes have different fraud thresholds or actions?

Yes — custom automation rules let you set per-code (or per-tag) fraud-score thresholds and choose whether to refund, place the order on fulfillment hold, or take no automatic action. Rules are matched in priority order, so you can override the default behavior for high-value or sensitive codes without changing how everything else is treated. If no custom rule matches, the default threshold from your settings applies.

Can the app observe abuse for a while before refunding automatically?

Yes. Every automation rule has an occurrence setting from 2 to 10. Occurrence 2 means act the second time an identity hits the rule; occurrence 3 means wait until the third; and so on, up to 10. Many merchants start at 3 or 4 to confirm patterns are real before going aggressive, then tighten the threshold once they trust the matches. It's the safest way to roll out auto-refunds on a new code.

Can I adjust how much weight each signal carries in the fraud score?

Yes. In the Fraud Score Rules tab you can tune the points awarded for each signal — exact shipping address, billing address, fuzzy address, phone, email, full name, first name, last name — and the threshold at which a customer is considered suspicious. The defaults work well for most stores; adjust only if you're seeing too many false positives or want stricter scoring on a specific signal.

What exactly happens when an order is refunded?

CustomerGenius issues a full refund through the Shopify API and optionally sends an automated email to you and the customer explaining the cancellation. If you have Recharge connected, any associated subscription is cancelled there as well. If you use ShipStation, the order is cancelled before it ships. All refund activity is logged in your CustomerGenius dashboard for monthly reporting.

Can I run a discount that's used once on my online store but applies on every subscription renewal?

Yes. Enable the Skip recurring subscription orders toggle in settings and renewal orders from Recharge and other supported subscription apps are excluded from fraud evaluation entirely. That means a discount code intended to be used only once on online store orders can keep auto-applying on every recurring renewal without each renewal triggering a duplicate-use refund — fraud checks run on the original online order, not on the renewals. As a side benefit, your existing subscribers also never get flagged for placing legitimate repeat orders that share the same address, email, or phone.

Can I block specific customers from ordering at all, regardless of discount use?

Yes — this is a separate feature from discount monitoring. The block list is for customers you've decided not to serve, like repeat chargeback filers or people who've abused your support team. Add a tag to a customer in Shopify and CustomerGenius will refund any future order from anyone matching their identity — even if they sign up with a new email, phone, or address. The block follows the person, not just the email.

Will CustomerGenius slow down my checkout?

No — CustomerGenius has zero impact on checkout speed. All fraud detection happens post-checkout via Shopify's order webhooks. Your storefront, cart, and payment flow are completely unaffected. Customers experience no difference at checkout regardless of whether their order is later flagged.

Is there a free trial for CustomerGenius?

Yes. All three pricing tiers include a 14-day free trial with full access to every feature — no credit card required to start. There is no permanent free tier, but the trial period is designed to give you enough data to see exactly how much discount fraud exists in your store and whether the subscription pays for itself (on average, merchants save 11x their monthly cost in recovered discounts).

What happens to customers who are caught abusing discounts?

Their order is refunded and they receive an optional notification email. Interestingly, based on aggregate data from CustomerGenius merchants, 38% of customers who are caught repurchase at full price — meaning catching fraud often converts an abusive customer into a profitable one.

How do I get help if something looks wrong?

Email our support team directly at support@customergenius.io. We're run by Shopify merchants ourselves and respond quickly to questions about fraud scoring, threshold tuning, or integration issues.

Comparison

Shopify Fraud Filter alternative

Shopify sunset the official Fraud Filter app on January 31, 2025, leaving merchants who relied on it looking for replacements. Shopify recommended migrating to Shopify Flow — but Flow can't replicate the cross-order identity matching that catches the most common form of merchant fraud: discount code abuse. Here's what changed, what Shopify's recommended replacements actually cover, and where CustomerGenius fits.

TL;DR

Shopify retired the Fraud Filter app on January 31, 2025 and recommended Shopify Flow as the migration path. For payment fraud and stolen-card chargebacks, Shopify still ships a built-in fraud analysis (the low/medium/high risk indicator) and offers Shopify Protect for Shop Pay orders, plus a marketplace of third-party apps like NoFraud, Signifyd, and the new Fraud Control. None of those replacements specifically address discount code abuse — the repeated redemption of first-time-customer codes by the same person under throwaway emails. CustomerGenius is built for exactly that problem, with multi-signal identity matching, fuzzy address detection, and configurable automation rules. It's not a one-to-one Fraud Filter replacement, but it covers the discount-abuse gap that none of the official replacements address.

Feature-by-feature comparison

Feature	CustomerGenius	Shopify Fraud Filter	Notes
Still available in 2026	✓	—	Fraud Filter sunset January 31, 2025
Detects discount code abuse across emails	✓	Partial	Fraud Filter could block by email pattern only
Identity matching across email, phone, name, address	✓	—	5-signal matching
Fuzzy address matching (typos, abbreviations)	✓	—
Cross-evaluation discount groups (SAVE10/SAVE20)	✓	—	Treat a code family as one offer
Configurable per-code thresholds and actions	✓	—	Custom automation rules
Occurrence-based rules (act on 3rd attempt etc.)	✓	—
Identity-based customer block list	✓	Partial	Fraud Filter blocked emails/IPs, not identity
Subscription-aware (skips Recharge renewals)	✓	—
Automatic refund/cancel on flagged orders	✓	—	Fraud Filter only flagged, never acted
Cost	$9.99–$29.99/mo	Was free	Fraud Filter was a free Shopify app

Why Shopify sunset Fraud Filter

Shopify announced the deprecation of the Fraud Filter app and retired it on January 31, 2025. The app had been around for years as a free utility that let merchants build custom filters — for example, block orders from specific email patterns, block by IP address, or auto-cancel orders shipping to known-fraud addresses. It was rule-based, manually maintained, and never had any cross-order identity logic. Shopify's official guidance to merchants was to migrate to Shopify Flow, which now exposes broader event triggers and actions across the platform, plus to rely on Shopify's built-in fraud analysis and the new Fraud Control app for the chargeback-prevention use cases.

What Shopify's recommended replacements actually cover

Shopify's built-in fraud analysis (the low/medium/high risk indicator on every order) and Shopify Protect (chargeback protection for Shop Pay orders) are both focused on payment fraud: stolen cards, mismatched billing/shipping, suspicious checkout behavior. They do that well. Shopify Flow is a workflow automation tool that can implement simple if-then rules at order time — useful for tagging, notifications, and basic conditional logic, but with no native concept of comparing one order against historical orders to find aliased customers. Third-party apps like NoFraud, Signifyd, and Fraud Control fill the chargeback/payment-fraud gap that the old Fraud Filter left. None of these replacements are built for discount code abuse, which is a fundamentally different problem.

Why discount code abuse needs its own tool

Discount stacking abuse doesn't look like payment fraud. The abuser uses their own real credit card, their own real address, and ships to themselves — every payment-fraud signal passes cleanly. The fraud is happening across orders, not within any single order: the same person creating a new email address each time to redeem a first-time-customer discount over and over. None of Shopify's recommended replacements compare new orders against historical orders on identity signals. CustomerGenius does exactly that. It pulls every prior order using a monitored discount code, matches the new order's email, phone, name, billing address, and shipping address (with fuzzy matching for typos and format variations), scores the result, and acts on it according to your configured threshold.

What you'd actually use post-sunset

For most Shopify stores, the post-Fraud-Filter stack looks like this. Payment fraud and chargebacks: Shopify's built-in fraud analysis plus Shopify Protect if you're on Shop Pay; add Signifyd, NoFraud, or Fraud Control if you have meaningful chargeback exposure (typically $10M+ GMV stores). General workflow automation: Shopify Flow. Discount code abuse: CustomerGenius. The categories don't overlap. None of these tools competes with the others; they cover different parts of the post-sunset fraud surface area.

Migrating discount-abuse rules from Fraud Filter to CustomerGenius

If you used Fraud Filter to block specific email patterns or addresses associated with discount abuse, you can replicate (and substantially improve on) those rules in CustomerGenius. The block list feature lets you ban specific customers across identities — so if a customer signs up under a new email but uses the same address or phone, they're still blocked. Custom automation rules let you set per-code thresholds (different thresholds per discount code) with configurable actions (refund vs. fulfillment hold vs. notify only). Cross-evaluation groups let you treat a family of codes — like every code starting with WELCOME — as a single eligibility pool, which Fraud Filter couldn't do at all. Setup typically takes under 10 minutes.

Which one should I use?

If you specifically lost discount-abuse protection when Fraud Filter was retired, CustomerGenius is the closest replacement — and meaningfully better at that specific job than Fraud Filter ever was. For payment fraud, lean on Shopify's built-in fraud analysis plus Shopify Protect (free) or NoFraud / Signifyd / Fraud Control (paid) if your chargeback exposure warrants it. The CustomerGenius 14-day free trial scans your last 60 days of orders during onboarding and shows you exactly how much discount abuse exists in your data, so you can see whether it's worth replacing the discount-abuse capability you lost.

Start the 14-day free trial See setup recipes

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