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Most customers don't know what a chargeback is. Those who do will never find your site. Only if you sell your service to the credit card companies will this work.
This business will fail even though the idea to improve the chargeback process is a good one (for both merchants and customers). Most customers don't know what a chargeback is. Those who do will never find your site. Only if you sell your service to the credit card companies will this work.
You're probably going to get a cease and desist letter at some point if you haven't already talked with the various financial institutions and have contacts there... you're almost certainly violating their terms of service (and maybe people filing through you are too).
You might want to be proactive about reaching out and making some contacts with the financial institutions.
Or maybe not, maybe it's OK. Just uninformed intuition there.
Also, you probably want to add some pretty serious language in bold saying "You must be telling the truth, not telling the truth here can cause serious harm, etc."
You probably also want to do some basic confirmation of a person's identity so you don't get whacky results. Ask for a phone number maybe, and occasionally spot check calls? I could see this being used for pranking, harassment, or inappropriate use (disgruntled employee, uninformed spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend, etc).
Feedback / thoughts about potential pitfalls: You're probably going to get a cease and desist letter at some point if you haven't already talked with the various financial institutions and have contacts there... you're almost certainly violating their terms of service (and maybe people filing through you are too). You might want to be proactive about reaching out and making some contacts with the financial institutio…
I've spoken to a few financial instituions. The general consensus seems to be that we're not doing anything they didn't wish customers did already - which is contact the merchant for a refund before creating a chargeback. We've been told that in only around 18% of chargebacks have the customers even told the merchant they have a problem before filing the chargeback.
I do expect someone along the line will have a problem with it, in which case we don't offer services for customers with that institution (after attempting to change their mind!).
We do have a layer of manual checks on each chargeback before they are processed. I like the idea of spot phone calls though - might add that in!
How is this different from BillGuard.com? (edit:) Well, I mean, for the features this site offers; BillGuard also seems to scan your bills proactively trying to help you deal with charges, but at the end of the process seems to be fairly similar: I (the merchant) receive an e-mail from them rather than a chargeback, combined with information that might be useful to look into the matter and fix the problem. (I only st…
That seems a bit sketchy to me - black-mailing merchants into signing up for your "service" of not sending them chargebacks?! Maybe you should explain why it's not.
Merchants don't need to sign up to resolve chargebacks. If we receive one, we'll send them links to resolve it before it gets sent to the banks. They can choose not too respond and it becomes a normal chargeback. Even if they do respond - all they have to do is acknowledge they're making a refund or change the customer's mind. The basic resolution service is free for merchants. They only have to pay or even sign up i…
However, if it is an attempt to reduce high costs of chargebacks that the banks usually create - this is a most welcome development that has potential to make this market more sane, which is great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it is actually worse than that. There is certain type of online customer that will literally click through "Interested->Purchase->Yes->Confirm>Pay>Done" without every really looking at what they purchased or why they did so in the first place. After they realize what they actually purchased which is a legitimate product but not appropriate for the customer, they just uses the chargeback process to get their money bac…
it is actually worse than that. There is a certain type of customer that will click through the whole process like you describe, and be perfectly satisfied with their purchase but not remember the name of the merchant. Then when it comes time to pay the credit card bill, it's an 'unrecognized charge' and they do a chargeback. They don't look through their email receipts and try to figure out what they've bought, they…
* Despite the name, you want the lowest discount rate you can get: it's the fee charged by your acquiring bank on top of interchange, and is basically the only thing in credit card payments that you have any ability to negotiate. As you'd expect, having more chargebacks hinders your ability to get the discount rate lowered.
chargeback only works because most users don't know it exists. If you start telling people all they have to do to get their money back from a merchant is to click a button, it won't be long before credit card companies are forced to get rid of it. please don't abuse this.