Bringing down chargebacks during this Holiday Season

With the holiday season bringing in more transactions than usual, it is best to ironclad your chargeback defenses to help keep your ratios down during the busiest time of the year.

Customer Support

An increase in sales means an increase in customers which creates more customer-related issues. Make sure your customer support channels are ready for more than usual during the holiday season. Keep your contact information on your website as visible as possible, to prevent any “merchant unresponsive” disputes or any other issues that may arise from not being able to contact you. Most importantly, be as quick as possible with your responses. It may be difficult as you are bombarded with more customer support issues than usual, but quick and swift responses help tremendously with preventing disputes and chargebacks.

Refund Policy

We mentioned in our previous article, “4 tips to get your online store ready for the holiday season,” the importance of altering your refund policy for the holiday season. As it is a good idea for customer relations and to help with sales, it can also help with bringing down your holiday chargebacks. A strong refund policy is a very strong tool to use in the dispute process.

Ship Fast

If you are dealing with physical goods, it is great idea to ship out your items as fast as possible. Fast shipping will help prevent and increase in “Services not Rendered” dispute codes, and can help insure that the product reaches the customer in time.

The holiday season can create a slowdown in shipping times, so it is best to also add an estimated date of arrival either in the terms of service, or to have it emailed to the customer after the purchase is completed. The stated dates of arrival are also a strong tool for retrieval requests and disputes.

Strengthen Your Anti-Fraud System

As the amount of sales increases, so does the chance of fraudulent transactions. Whether it be credit fraud or friendly fraud, it is always important to bring down fraudulent transactions to a minimum, because those are the chargebacks and disputes that rarely end in the merchant’s favor.

It is best to check with your anti-fraud system provider or programmers as to what can be done to make your automated review stricter, or what flags need to be raised during the holiday seasons.

Increasing the percentage of transactions that reach manual review for the months of November and December is a good way to start. Also requesting a copy of ID and a faxed signature for high amount orders can also help with eliminating any fraudulent transactions.

When an increase in sales is predicted, it is always recommended to have everything in place to prevent any unnecessary chargebacks.

We are planning to publish a more detailed insight on chargebacks and how to successfully dispute them very soon.