Fraud Detection and Geolocation APIs

Overview

Squirrelcart integrates with some popular fraud detection and geolocation APIs, which can be used to help prevent fraudulent orders and to give you a better idea of where the customer is in the world based on their IP address.

Geolocation by IP address is not perfect. It will give you an approximate location of the user. That location can sometimes be inaccurate.

Assessing orders to determine if they are fraudulent is up to you. While these tools can help, there is no guarantee they will help you to reduce all of your fraudulent orders.

APIs supported

MinFraud (by MaxMind.com) - This service is very inexpensive ($.005 per query as of this writing). It provides more information then you will get from FreeGeoIP.net, and includes a risk score to help you asses the likelihood that the order might be fraudulent. We recommend using this API. To use this service you will need to sign up on their website and obtain a license key.

More information about MinFraud can be found here.
FreeGeoIP.net - This option is completely free but returns less detail than the MinFraud API.

More information about FreeGeoIP.net can be found here.

How it works

At the time of order completion Squirrelcart will send a request behind the scenes to the API that you have enabled. Information received in that response is included in your order notification emails, and is also visible when viewing orders in edit mode in the control panel.

The information shown will vary depending on the API that you've enabled. Here is an example of the results returned by MinFraud:

Requirements

CURL PHP Extension, with SSL support
PHP 5.2 or newer

Enabling an API

Open the control panel
Click the Store Settings link in the toolbar:
Locate the Fraud Detection and Geolocation APIs fieldset:
Set the Service field to the API you wish to use. If using MinFraud, enter your license key in the field of the same name.
If using FreeGeoIP.net, no license key is required.
Click the Save Changes button.
To test, complete an order in your store and view the resulting order notification email.