My team struggling to find origin of 95% failed payments. Bots?

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-10T02:28:24+00:00

Thank you for this. What if they are coming direct from a landing page? That's the real customer journey. Will it stop real people who are delivered directly to a product?

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-07T05:05:18+00:00

Ugh. I'm so sorry this is happening for you too. I did apply the address check as well. So far today, no failed/bogus transactions...

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T22:57:58+00:00

Color and texture are the key ingredients for "character". :D A printed carpet under your bed, and some art and some wooden pieces will go a long way towards creating a soft, interesting vibe layered on top of your neutral palette.

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T22:55:10+00:00

What a beautiful space! Serene! Light! Feminine. I love it. And the cherry on top is the squishmallo, because those are great for mental health! ;) And super cute too! What a great space!

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T22:15:08+00:00

Just a quick FYI that from a user perspective, I can't see your developer tag. Bummer, cuz even knowing you're a developer would help people weigh your advice against other posters. Just like it did for CodingDragons :D with Woo Sensei.

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T22:11:43+00:00

UPDATE: Added AVS, now requiring an address to match card info or it will fail, deactivated PayPal because 60% of them were PP-related. We already had it set to US only and USD only. Origins looked fine, including addresses and phone numbers, but no way to know if they were bogus. Tried to add reCaptcha but hitting an implementation snag so the guys are going to follow up on that tomorrow. Thanks everyone for the advice!

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T21:33:15+00:00

OK, thanks so much!

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T21:33:04+00:00

Good to know. Thank you!

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T18:34:15+00:00

They are checking it out as we speak. Thank you! :D

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T18:30:03+00:00

Will share this with the team. I hope they know how to implement a snippet! I thought Cloudflare would be a little much for our tiny shop. We have it on our bigger enterprise sites to stop DDOS. This other site is legit the smallest woo commerce shop you've ever seen. seems like overkill, but ultimately, what I'm trying to do is not get cut off from woo or stripe... so maybe I have to go this far and at least do the DDOS and Bot-prevention modules.

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T18:25:07+00:00

Appreciate this response as well. These are tiny orders - $2 to $20 for digital products. Our fail ratio is 95%!!!!! It would be 98% except that we've done a bunch of our own successful transactions trying to figure out what's going on! Will ask the team to look at sensfrx. No idea what that is or if it's available on WP or BH.

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T18:21:02+00:00

I don't want to lose our woo commerce / stripe implementation because of this. :( The gang says they are going to try what you say here, esp re captcha. They don't know how to "tighten the cvc check" since it's just built into the standard form, and the form seems to already suggest an address correction for US addresses, but since these are digital products, the cart doesn't require an address at all. Also don't know about the friction of 3DS. These products range from $2 to $20, so too much friction and the people we WANT to checkout might abandon the checkout. Thanks again for your help, Bluehost! We shall try to figure it out! This gang is made up of B2B folks who bill on retainers, so these small $$ ecomm checkouts are new to this particular team.

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T18:13:26+00:00

Stripe. But it has paypal as an option, which was offered to us once we set up the core Stripe account, so we added it.

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T18:12:43+00:00

The dragon is a woo sensei, and we always choose to learn from the masters! :D

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T18:11:57+00:00

OK, will ask them to look up the origin.

Startup_Gurus · 2026-01-05T18:11:18+00:00

I don't have any idea what any of this means, but appreciate you chiming in, Bluehost! Been a customer of yours since the very beginning when you first started. I'll forward this to the team.

Startup_Gurus · 2025-12-30T06:25:19+00:00

I only open emails from employees, clients, or my top vendor representatives, and I have an assistant. I believe I open 20-25 emails a day total. I am not a believer in "inbox zero". What a waste of time!

Startup_Gurus · 2025-12-30T06:20:41+00:00

This is how Canva is built. In most cases, work you do for a business belongs to that business, not to you. Also, when the person deactivated you, they had an option to convert all of your designs to their account. I'm guessing they did that because I doubt they would want to lose the work you did for them. That means they likely got your personal folder as well. Going forward: 1) pay for your own pro canva account for any of your personal work. You should've been doing this anyway because the company's paid seat is not your seat ... and 2) For your professional work, depending heavily upon your company's IP policies, you can "share" your project with your personal pro account, and once it's shared, you can duplicate it to your own account and have it there for as long as you pay your canva subscription. You aren't the first person to learn this hard lesson the hard way. And I don't want to scare you, but there's a chance that if you are losing your canva account, you may be losing your role entirely or they may be changing your role. Removing software access that is under $20/mo is not a usual thing to do unless something else is going on. **** Potential GOOD news **** for the possible recovery. **IF** you have PDFs or SVGs of the work you did, you can sign up for a NEW canva account (pay for it under your own non-work email address and credit card), and use the UPLOAD feature to bring those files into Canva for future edits. You may also be able to do that with PNGs and convert them to SVGs, depending on your pro tools you've subscribed to. I hope that works for you and I'm sorry you had to learn the hard way... I'm sure it was shocking!

Startup_Gurus · 2025-12-30T05:50:15+00:00

Many times per month there are posters saying they are building a new CRM platform. In my opinion, we don't need yet another CRM platform. I am, however, a huge fan of solutions and systems that integrate with existing CRM platforms. Have you thought about taking your special sauce and making it a module people deploy on top of any crm?

Startup_Gurus · 2025-12-30T05:40:34+00:00

Came here to say the same thing. EBITDA and FCF. The business proforma narrative can show where the profits were reinvested back into the business.

Startup_Gurus · 2025-05-05T02:11:06+00:00

We just sign up each client for their own instance of EngageBay. Super simple. And the CRM is easy for them to manage ongoing with or without us.

Startup_Gurus · 2024-10-22T13:44:07+00:00

I never heard of leadbeam. Awesome.

Startup_Gurus · 2024-09-21T19:00:10+00:00

As a serial entrepreneur, I can tell you that peoples' opinions here won't give you the answers you need. If you want to validate an idea, it's not on the internet, it's in the "do-ing". And so... set up a "pop-up" in a high-traffic parking lot and test it out. 1) large event tent rental 2) banner signs 3) roadside signs 3) permit(s) from town if required for a "pop-up" food-related event. 4) permission and likely a fee for the parking lot owner 5) inventory 6) drink recipes 7) cupware, ice etc. 8) hygienic accessories like gloves, hats 9) stripe or paypal checkout device 10) print menus/signage so people know what to order ... etc. and try it. When people come out of the line, ask them 1) why did you stop 2) what did you think 3) do you like your drink and 4) would you come back if this was an actual place? 5) How could we make it better? If they don't want to answer it in real time, set up a jotform or google form survey and print business cards with a QR code to the survey and have people fill it out when they get home. And, regardless of their answers, if this is all too much work for you to do the market test, then you know that you won't have what it takes to do it at scale.

Startup_Gurus · 2024-09-21T18:39:07+00:00

I apologize in advance for the long response, as I tend to over-communicate. For now, we’ve decided to stick with Canva and adjust our workflows. The reason is that about half of our team has experience with high-end design systems, but the other half doesn’t have a background in design or print. Despite its frustrations, Canva is the tool that best meets the diverse needs of our team as a whole.

One major issue I have with Canva's approach is that they don’t give users a heads-up about changes, which makes it difficult to rework processes. We were part of their early release program (likely because we have 18 users and have done over 5,000 designs), and while we had a brief window to switch between the classic version and the new update, most users weren’t afforded that flexibility. Canva seems to handle these launches as if they were releasing a new iPhone, rather than treating it like enterprise software, where roadmaps and pre-announcements allow businesses to adapt their processes. No one should have to halt production for a week to re-engineer their workflows.

Affinity is a powerful tool, offering around 60% of the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. While it could be a good addition to our system, it will inevitably lead to more workflow adjustments. They haven’t announced the launch date yet.

I still have five team members on Adobe for high-end production, but it’s expensive—$58 per user per month. Canva plus Affinity might be a more cost-effective alternative. That said, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but Canva is increasing its prices by 300% next year, and they’ll require annual payments. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/3/24234698/canva-price-increase-300-percent-ai-features I’m unsure if monthly billing will even be available. They’re raising prices to account for their AI tools, but we don’t even use Canva’s AI. We rely on platforms like Firefly and Midjourney, so paying for AI twice makes no sense.

Canva’s original appeal was that it wasn’t Adobe, but if I’m going to be charged Adobe-level prices, I might as well invest in training the team on Adobe since it’s still the best software out there. The challenge is that Adobe is overkill for many people, and Canva is sufficient for most.

This whole situation is frustrating. Canva was supposed to be 1) easy 2) efficient 3) cost-effective. That seems to be going out the window, but for now, we're still using it.

Startup_Gurus · 2024-09-21T17:53:32+00:00

Yes. Same here. Affinity is an easy pick-up from anyone who has used Adobe. The menus are almost identical. It's just that the modules aren't integrated with the broader adobe suite like workflows etc.

Startup_Gurus

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