Even with accurate product pages and a researcher gate, some orders will not fit your buyer profile: a personal email, a home address, no organization, a note about personal use. The aim of a review is not to guess at intent. It is to check the order against the standard you set, ask for what is missing, and make a decision you can explain later.
This guide covers the signals worth a closer look and a review process that is fair to buyers and easy to show to anyone who asks how you handle these orders.
Signals worth a closer look
- Buyer type left blank, or set to an option your profile does not serve.
- No organization name, or a name you cannot find.
- A free webmail address together with a residential ship-to, when your profile expects an institution or business.
- A ship-to organization that differs from the buyer's organization.
- Order notes, emails or support messages that mention personal use, or ask about use in people or animals.
- A buyer you refused before, ordering again under different details.
- Billing and shipping in different countries, or a ship-to in a destination you do not serve.
- A first order much larger than is usual for that buyer type.
No single signal decides an order. Several together justify a hold and a question. Stripe's own guidance on manual reviews gives similar examples of payments a business might want to look at, such as payments made from outside your country, above a certain amount, or using an email address from an unusual domain.
Hold the payment, and do not ship
If you take card payments through Stripe, you can authorize a payment at checkout and capture it later. Stripe's documentation says an authorization holds the amount on the buyer's payment method, and that an online card authorization is usually valid for 7 days. If the authorization expires before you capture, the funds are released and the payment is canceled.
Holding before capture also keeps the cost of saying no low. Stripe says you can cancel a payment before it is completed at no cost, while refunding a payment after it succeeds might incur a fee, and Stripe's processing fees from the original transaction are not returned. Stripe also notes that payments placed in its Radar review queue are typically already processed, unless you capture authorized payments later. Authorize now, capture later explains the mechanics.
A fair review process
- Write your criteria down. List the signals that trigger a hold and what evidence clears each one.
- Hold the order. Do not pick, pack or ship until the review is complete.
- Ask for what is missing. Be specific and polite. For example: "Thanks for your order. We supply laboratories and registered businesses only. To complete it, please reply with your organization's name, your role, and a business delivery address."
- Set a deadline inside the authorization window. Leave enough time to decide and capture before the hold expires.
- Decide against your criteria. Base the decision on what the buyer provided and what you could check, not on a hunch.
- Record the decision. Note what you checked, what you found, the outcome, the reason, and who decided.
- Tell the buyer. Confirm the order if approved. If declined, say so clearly and cancel the authorization rather than capturing and refunding.
Stripe's review guidance suggests passing extra order and shipping details to the payment as metadata, so the reviewer sees what they need in one place. It also points out that a review adds time between order and delivery, which matters less for businesses that already ship physical goods.
When the buyer does not reply
Some buyers will not answer. Decide in advance how long you wait, and make sure that period ends before the authorization expires. When it ends, cancel the payment, tell the buyer the order has been canceled and why, and record that no reply was received. Do not capture the payment while you wait, and do not ship on the assumption that silence means the buyer qualifies.
Declining an order well
A clear, polite refusal protects both sides. Tell the buyer that you supply business and research buyers only and that you cannot complete this order. Do not suggest ways to get around your rules, such as choosing a different buyer type, using another address, or ordering again under someone else's details. Remove them from marketing lists. When consumers find your research supply site covers messaging for consumer visitors more broadly.
Keep the process consistent
- Apply the same criteria to every order, including large and returning buyers.
- Have a second person look at a sample of decisions from time to time.
- Look for criteria that cause most holds but rarely change the outcome, and refine them.
- Update your written criteria when your buyer profile changes, and date each version.
If you are still deciding what evidence to ask for, how to verify business and research buyers covers email domains, registration details and ship-to checks.
What a review cannot do
A review shows that you looked at an order against a written standard and acted on what you found. It cannot prove what a buyer intends, and it does not make up for product pages or marketing that point toward consumers. Claddr lets you write hold rules in plain terms: matching orders are authorized but not captured until a reviewer on your team approves them, and each hold and decision is stored against the order. See how Claddr works.