Yesterday I received a phone call from Chase and the representative told me she had a customer on the line that did not recognize a charge from my company and asked to 3 way her in to find out more details because the customer thinks it was fraud.
Sadly this situation is often caused by:
1. Sites that use merchant accounts with a different name than the site name.
2. Domains with privacy protection
3. Lack of phone #s in the billing information on the CC bill
4. Lack of easily found contact information and return/refund policies on the site
If your billing name isn't the same as your site name, that's a recipe for disaster and chargeback hell. People will try looking up "Widget Consulting" or whatever the billing shows when the site might be "Widget World" or "Example.com". Then they go back and find that the place they purchased from doesn't have a phone number, the whois lookup shows a privacy registration, etc. and they quickly end up calling the credit card company because things suddenly aren't passing the sniff test and they become frustration.
Sure, some of it's fraud, I've run into that too, but a lot of this is because the site is friendly to purchase but not friendly to do returns or refunds.
If you don't want chargebacks make sure your refund policy is on the website, a copy is placed in the order, there's a phone # easy to find, and the merchant account name that shows on the CC bill has the same name or domain name and a phone # so they can easily reach you from the CC bill itself. When possible, leave real contact info in your domain registration as many people surprisingly look there when trying to contact people.
How I know this is one of my domains HAD my home phone # listed, now it's a business line. We got several calls a month from people wanting to know what this charge was on the CC bill.
Now here's and example of how it all goes to hell; the husband buys something and doesn't tell the wife and she's the one paying the bills and reviewing the charges and if she doesn't recognize the charge, she tries to find out what it is. If you don't make it easy for her to find out, you're facing a chargeback.
That's not fraud, that's simple lack of communication but the vendor takes it in the shorts if the vendor doesn't make it as easy as possible to be contacted.
Plus, I do monthly recurring charges and for several months the same guy kept calling that couldn't remember what the charge was for in the first place. Had I not make it easy to contact our company from the CC bill it most surely would've ended up as a chargeback.
The point is before you think every chargeback is a fraud, which many are, make sure you've covered all your bases so that a reasonable person with a reasonable question about a charge on a CC bill can easily find someone that can quickly give them a reasonable answer.
Otherwise brace for the inevitable >!GNIHCAK!<
That's >KACHING!< in reverse, aka the chargeback.
P.S. I used real world examples as you can't make this stuff up, really.
