Preventing Chargebacks

With the Holiday shopping season in full swing consumers are swiping their credit cards left and right, and even the most careful consumers are liable to lose a receipt or forget about a purchase. If they happen to forget about their purchase from you, you could be faced with a chargeback.

A chargeback results from a successfully disputed credit or debit card charge, initiated by the customer. If the customer is unhappy with the product or service you delivered, never recieved the product or service they paid for or doesn’t believe they authorized the transaction they can initiate a chargeback.

If a chargeback goes through, the money will be taken out of the bank account tied to your merchant account immediately and your merchant credit score can be negatively affected as well.

Our number one tip for preventing chargebacks is to make sure the name on your website or business matches the name on the billing statement. For example, although our corporate name is Transcomp, our clients know us as Evolve Systems, so it is very important that any charges that come through on their credit card statement appear as Evolve Systems. If you aren’t sure what name is appearing on billing statements please contact us right way at 651-628-4000.

Here are some additional steps to guard again chargebacks, courtesy of Sterling Payment Technologies:

• Get an imprint of the card whenever you manually key in the transaction
• Make sure that all the details of the transaction show up on the imprint
• Verify that the number on the screen matches the embossed number on the credit card
• Request a signed photo ID to verify the cardholder’s identity
• Obtain an authorization number for the full amount of the sale. Do not break the sale into several smaller amounts
• Check the expiration date on the card
• As always, don’t accept an unsigned credit card. Ask for an additional form of signed photo ID, then ask the consumer to either sign the card (and compare the signatures) or ask for an alternate form of payment.

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