Charge backs are root of all problems for “high risk” merchant accounts. Whether you’re a brand new company selling information products, you’re an established, high volume eCommerce company or you’re a furniture store – it’s incredibly important to avoid credit card charge backs. And especially when you are an eCommerce company, you must have a look right here to understand the other various hidden dangers that you might be strolling into.
Visa & MasterCard start monitoring any business who has more than .5% of their transactions disputed by customers. If you exceed 1%, you are likely to be shut down. The question is: How do you avoid getting to that point?
Well let’s start at the beginning. At the most basic level, charge backs are a result of unhappy customers. Your goal as a business owner should be to keep customers happy at every step of the way – even when they’re already very unhappy. Easy Pay Direct offers full fledged charge back reduction programs to help business owners who have excessive charge backs – but here are a few quick tips to help keep you out of hot water.
1) Make your customer service number as accessible as possible
Add it to your shopping cart pages, FAQ pages and any other place a customer / client might navigate to when they are considering a return. If your customer / client has an easy way to return instead of charge back, they are more likely to do so.
2) Add your customer service number to your descriptor
Your descriptor is the text that shows up on your customer / client’s credit card statement to indicate that they have purchase something from you. Seeing a charge on their credit card statement is frequently the catalyst for a return or charge back. If your 800 number is the first thing they see, they’re much more likely to call YOU
3) Restrict purchases from foreign countries
If you are selling heavily online, there are countries that have significantly more fraud than others. India and much of South America for example, have much high fraud ratios than the United States. This frequently means purchases on stolen credit cards, which will result in charge backs. If your gateway has the ability to prevent people from certain countries from purchasing (based on IP address)– take advantage of it.
For more help with managing charge backs, just give us a call! We’re here to make things easier 🙂 800.805.4949
