First, let me explain why drop-shipping is a popular vector for fraud. Drop-shipping means selling a product which you don't make or hold in stock; instead, when a purchase comes in you go and buy it somewhere else and have it shipped directly to the buyer. You can think of it as a form of arbitrage. They're remarkably efficient businesses: they need to have no assets or physical presence. The flip side of that is that if you were looking to create a legitimate-looking shell business to, say, cash in on stolen credit cards then drop-shipping would be a very plausible cover story. It's hard for us to disprove.

Since Stripe is on the hook if customers don't get their goods or services, we need to be able to ensure that the businesses are legitimate. It's hard for us to reliably do so with drop-shippers. While dropshipping is not Shopify's primary business, they are more specialized in ecommerce, they have more business-specific data, and there are a handful of other properties which let them support these businesses more readily.