An order that loses money looks normal:
until something is actually watching
A single order below cost, a stolen card test, a pricing bug that undercuts your own margin, none of these look urgent in isolation, and by the time someone notices the pattern in a monthly report hundreds of orders have gone through. We build an agent that checks every order against the rules that actually matter and raises a flag within minutes instead of a month.
The process today
Most fraud and margin problems are not dramatic, they are quiet and repetitive. A card-testing script runs a dozen small authorizations against your checkout overnight, a supplier price changes and nobody updates your floor price before a listing goes out below cost, or a promo code stacking bug lets an order through at a discount nobody approved. None of these show up as an emergency, each one just looks like one more order in a queue, and by the time a monthly reconciliation catches the pattern, the loss has already compounded across every order that slipped through the same gap.
The reason this goes unnoticed for so long is that catching it requires checking every single order against its own cost and risk profile, in real time, which is exactly the kind of repetitive cross-check that does not get done by hand at any real volume. A business processing a few hundred orders a day cannot have someone manually verify unit economics on every one, so the checking either does not happen or happens as a sample audit weeks after the fact, long after the damage is done.
What the agent does
Checks every order against cost and margin before it ships, comparing the sale price to the actual current supplier cost, platform fee and shipping, and holding anything that would lose money.
Flags card-testing and velocity fraud patterns, like a burst of small authorizations from one source or an unusual number of orders to new addresses from the same payment method in a short window.
Watches for pricing bugs, catching a listing that dropped below its floor price from a sync error, a stacking discount, or a supplier cost change nobody updated downstream.
Monitors supplier and payout anomalies, flagging a payout that does not match expected volume or a supplier delivery pattern that looks wrong before it becomes a bigger reconciliation problem.
Routes every flag to Telegram or Slack with the order already on hold, so whoever is on call sees the case and the reasoning at the same time, not a vague warning.
Logs every flagged and cleared case, and reports weekly on fraud and margin-loss trends, so a recurring pattern gets fixed at its source instead of caught order by order forever.
What stays with humans
The agent holds and flags, it does not cancel an order or ban a customer on its own. Every hold waits for a person to clear it or escalate it, and decisions with legal or customer-relationship weight (reporting a suspected fraud ring, banning an account, reversing a payout) stay entirely with your team. If the agent’s own rules seem to be producing too many false holds, that is itself a flag for a human to retune the thresholds, not something the agent adjusts by itself.
Guards
A calibration period where the agent’s flags are checked against cases your team already knows the outcome of, so the thresholds are tuned to your real fraud and margin patterns before anything holds a live order unattended. After that, every hold logs the exact rule and data behind it, rate limits and spend caps stop a single bad pattern from holding your entire order queue, and a kill switch disables holds on any single rule or the whole system instantly if a rule needs adjusting.
Price and timeline
| Package | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Single automation | from $1,500 | One store or marketplace, standard cost, fraud and margin rules |
| Department package | from $2,500 | Fraud alerts plus affiliate reporting and multi-marketplace repricing sharing the same order data |
6 to 12 days covers defining your cost basis and fraud patterns, connecting order data, and the calibration period before holds go live unattended.
Related
Works closely with multi-marketplace repricing and pricing rules and margin guards, since all three protect the same margin, and with affiliate reporting where payout anomalies overlap. Part of automation of everything digital and built the way we build AI agents for our own products. This is, almost exactly, the guard we run on our own marketplace: ProBay’s margin guard verified zero of 864 orders below cost. The analytics warehouse behind our two-brand analytics hub caught 184 of 218 price-undercut events with zero false alarms using the same approach, and our 25,746-listing pricing engine exists specifically to keep a catalogue of that size from drifting below floor price unnoticed.
Tell us your order volume and your current cost and fraud rules, and we will send back a fixed price and a plan for the first week: get in touch.
Tired of doing this by hand? We can take the whole routine off your team, not just this step: Routine takeover, from $400 →
FAQ
How much does a fraud and anomaly alert agent cost?
A single store or marketplace, standard fraud and margin rules, starts from $1,500. A department package covering fraud alerts plus affiliate reporting and repricing starts from $2,500, priced once we know your order volume and risk surface.
How long does it take to go live?
6 to 12 days: defining your actual cost basis and fraud patterns, connecting order and payment data, and a calibration period checking the agent's holds against cases your team already knows were fraud or genuine, to cut down on false alarms before go-live.
Which tools does it connect to?
Your store backend and payment processor for order and transaction data, your supplier or fulfilment APIs for cost verification, your pricing engine if you have one, and Telegram or Slack for alerts routed to whoever is on call.
What if the agent holds a legitimate order?
A hold is a pause, not a cancellation, and every flagged order shows the exact rule that triggered it so a person can clear a false positive in seconds. We calibrate the rules against your real order history before launch specifically to keep false holds low.
Is our order and payment data safe?
The agent reads order, cost and payment data under your existing processor and store permissions, scoped to the checks it runs, and we do not retain transaction data outside the monitoring pipeline. Access can be revoked at any time.