It has been requested from several vendors that we add a feature to prevent problem buyers from making purchases at a store. The scenarios given to us were buyers who repeatedly made purchases then did chargebacks through PayPal or other processors.

Today we released the buyer blacklist feature that lets you block these problem customers.

For PayPal Payments Standard, 2CheckOut, or AlertPay transactions DPD doesn’t know who the buyer is until their payment verification is returned to us after they’ve paid along with their name, email, and address if applicable. This presents a unique problem for us, because for half the transactions that go through DPD we don’t know who the buyers are until after they’ve paid.

To work within this limitation, the blacklist works two different ways depending on what payment method is used on any given store:

For Credit Card Methods (Stripe, Authorize.net, etc.):

DPD will block any buyers who match the blacklist rules from purchasing your product.

For PayPal, AlertPay, 2CheckOut, and other 3rd Party Payment Methods:

Because we can’t stop them before they buy (because we don’t know who they are), DPD will check all incoming payment notifications against the blacklist and deny delivery of the products in the order if they match. Orders that fail the blacklist check will be placed in a holding status and the vendor notified via email. The vendor will then have the option to either allow delivery or process a refund through their payment processor.

A Word of Warning:

Vendors can create wildcard blocklist rules based on buyer email address or IP address. This can be a dangerous feature if you’re not careful- it’s very possible to block a huge number of people from buying from your store.

95% of vendors won’t need this feature, but the 5% that do need it really need it. We highly recommend you carefully read the blacklist documentation in our knowledgebase before setting up blacklist rules:

Blacklist / Block Email and IP Addresses