Documentation / Drop Configuration
Policy Rules Reference
Detailed reference for every rule available in a FairDrop policy — what each one checks, and how it raises the cost of reselling at scale. For a step-by-step setup guide, see Creating a Policy.
Rule overview
| Rule | What it checks |
|---|---|
| Account required | Whether the buyer is signed in to a Shopify customer account |
| VIP tags | Whether the buyer's account has any of the selected tags (OR semantics) |
| Quantity cap | Whether a single order contains more protected units than the configured per-order limit |
| Passkey verification | Whether the buyer has completed a biometric challenge on your storefront |
All rules are enforced by Shopify's checkout engine — not the storefront, not the browser. A buyer who doesn't meet a rule cannot complete checkout, regardless of how they reached it.
What each rule defends against
Because enforcement happens server-side, none of these rules can be bypassed with scripts, browser automation, or direct API calls. Their value isn't a lock that's hard to pick — it's economic. Each rule makes buying at scale slower, costlier, and harder to run from a bot farm.
Account required
Without an account requirement, resellers buy as guests — endless anonymous orders from disposable emails, with no identity to rate-limit, tag, or trace. Requiring sign-in attaches every purchase to a customer record, so buying in volume means creating and maintaining many accounts, each one visible in your admin and subject to tags and order history. Anonymous bulk traffic becomes something you can actually see and limit.
VIP tags
A public product is buyable by anyone with the link — and links leak the instant they're posted to a cook group or Discord. Tag-gating restricts checkout to accounts you've approved, so a reseller can't simply buy their way in. They'd need a genuinely eligible account for every order, which doesn't scale across a farm of throwaway profiles.
Quantity cap
With no per-order limit, a single checkout can clear the entire drop — one buyer takes the whole run and relists it. The cap is applied per order, not as a running total per customer: the same shopper can place more than one order, so it makes buying in bulk progressively more expensive rather than forbidding repeat purchases outright. Every additional unit still costs the reseller another eligible account, another checkout, and another verification.
Passkey verification
This is the control resellers can't automate around. Without it, bots finish checkout in milliseconds — hundreds of parallel sessions from a server farm, no human in the loop. Passkey verification requires a real biometric gesture on a real device for every purchase, and there's no token to script, replay, or share. The only way through is a person physically approving each order on their own phone or laptop, which collapses a bot farm's throughput to the speed of human hands and makes buying at scale impractical rather than merely slow.
Enforcement schedule
Enforcement runs on a scheduled window, not a mode toggle. You author the window while building the policy (see Creating a Policy), and it can be edited until it starts.
| Field | What it sets |
|---|---|
| Start | Date and time enforcement begins. FairDrop switches enforcement on 1 minute before this. |
| End | Date and time enforcement ends. The policy expires at this point. |
| Timezone | The timezone the start and end times are read in. |
| Window length | Start to end — up to 30 days. |
One purchase, one window
Status glossary
A policy shows one of these statuses as it moves from draft to expired.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | You're still building the policy; nothing is enforced. |
| Needs purchase | Ready to set up, but requires a one-time purchase before it can enforce — unless it's your free drop. |
| Ready | Activated and eligible to enforce, but no window is set yet. |
| Scheduled | A window is set and hasn't started. |
| Active | Enforcing right now, inside the window. |
| Paused | You paused enforcement mid-window; resume anytime on the same window. |
| Expired | The window ended. Final — create a new policy to run the drop again. |
| Monitor | Previewing your rules by logging checkouts without blocking — a free, before-the-window mode. A live window always takes over from it. |