It is important that you take actions to help prevent chargebacks because:
- Your processor charges you a fee for each chargeback you receive.
- Multiple chargebacks may result in compliance issues.
Note: Taking action to prevent chargebacks does not guarantee that you won’t receive any chargebacks.
To help prevent chargebacks, we recommend you follow these best practices:
Do:
- Make sure your merchant descriptor matches the name of your business so that it displays correctly on the cardholder’s statement
- Check the expiration date of a cardholder’s card to make sure it has not expired
- Get another form of payment if the cardholder’s card is declined
- Confirm you received a valid authorization before running all transactions
- Run all transactions using the correct currency
- Make sure your receipts show the correct currency
- Tell the cardholder about your refund policy and cancelation policy at the time of the transaction
- Issue refunds to the cardholder in a timely manner
Don’t:
- Make any adjustments to the transaction documentation after the transaction without consulting the cardholder and obtaining their agreement
- Use the cardholder’s payment details to recover a dollar amount from previous chargebacks, bad checks, or any other incidents where a financial loss occurs
- Force an authorization by lowering the amount or altering any of the transaction details
- Manually enter the transaction or call to get a voice authorization after you receive a “Decline” response
- Batch out the same transaction multiple times
- Continue to charge the cardholder’s account after you receive a chargeback
- Run a transaction more than seven days after you receive a voice authorization
- Refund the cardholder for a transaction they have disputed
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Tags: dispute, retrieval request, defend chargeback, avoid chargebacks, future, issue chargeback, chargeback process