Forum Moderators: buckworks
The cost is £20.00 per month and 1% of the transaction fee.
As I am selling high risk goods (jewellery, Art & Crfts) should I opt for it and then obviously pass the cost on to the customer?
Daniela
I have seen it before mentioned but do not know what those abreviations mean.
I am more or less fully protected by taken out this, which means I wont lose any money if a chargeback occurs.
Transactions of up to £100.00 are guaranteed without proof of delivery.
Transactions of £100.00 to £250.00 with proof of delivery.
Over £250.00 by special arrangement.
Of course no mention what this special arrangement is. So another email to them (sigh).
Some of my 22carat jewellery will be more than £2000.00
so I really need to protect the whole thing, Unless I do as I read somewhere else on this board that those items can only be purchased via bank transfer?
Daniela
I have several high priced items as well.
For a per transaction fee it will block all fraudulent chargebacks.
Another added perk...Visa can reduce your interchage rate by 5 basis points if you run this program. One of my plasma's goes for $10,000. I sell that online and "insure" it with VbV for 10 cents, and I get $50 in return based on my interchange savings. I have an associate who started the program with his company recently, his estimated ROI for 2004 (based solely on his interchange savings) is $100,000+.
Go to a preferred vendor recommended by Visa, and make sure its delivered ASP, and they bundle Verified by Visa, MasterCard SecureCode. Even if they do supply it ASP, its not...unles they are partnered with the ASP developer for Visa. What they do have, if they aren't partnered with that company, is the enterprise version of it...the original version.
This "box" is garbage and completely unreliable. Imagine getting a $2,000 trx and you have the service, and you are charged, but the power went out at Worldpay, or they were conducting servor maintenance...call up that customer and ask them to ring up their order again.
Look into it, for you its a slam dunk.
What it does is that it will reimburse you against chargebacks of any kind provided that the transaction is below GBP250 and that no warning was given by Worldpay.
The situations when a warning is issued would be:
1. The CVS code is wrong
2. The country in which the card is issued is different to that of the invoice address.
We get fraudulent orders and are now very good in detecting them. Although our chargeback rate is now around 0.2%, we still feel that it is well worth the money because it saves us a lot of time and anxiety in verifying each order.
Jewellry are high risk items. If you are considering shipping them overseas, I would highly recommend that you get it. If you are only shipping locally within the UK, then perhaps you may take a wait and see attitude.
If the average size of your order is over GBP250 then you can either discuss with Worldpay to raise the ceiling, or to insist on T/T or an escrow service.
PayPal payments from verified users are actually quite safe but are not foolproof.
I think to reduce costs I might just ask for Bank transfers for the high cost goods. This might of course loose me orders unless I can get something that is protective, however some of the cost will be very high. So its a catch 22 situation.
I have to sleep on it and also look at other websites selling similar things how they do it.
Escrow is not an option, never liked it. Also the way the business is set up there is no scope for it.
Daniela
Imagine getting a $2,000 trx and you have the service, and you are charged, but the power went out at Worldpay
If the power went out at WorldPay? Do you mean if the power (electricity) went off? If so, you are only charged for the transactions that go through. If the servers all went down, you wouldn't be charged because the customer couldn't pay!
Or do you mean the 'power' (I.E. they go bankrupt)? This is unlikely to happen, it is more likely to happen to many of their competitors. WorldPay are owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland who also own Natwest and Streamline (I believe they are the biggest bank in the UK now, with the exception of HSBC who have less in the UK but more worldwide).
And both the above problems can happen with any provider. Take the card on your own server, that is the safest. Is it? What if your server went down, or the 'power' went out? What if your server had a DOS attack?
Look at 2checkout problems, same as WorldPay but took them longer to sort out. And did they pay compensation? WorldPay paid me to open up a NetBanx merchant account!
The best method for safety in the situation is to have more than one merchant account. PayPal as a last resort. Program your code so that you can change from one provider to another in seconds. Your $2000 jewellery order will be a lot safer now.
WorldPay has had two series of DOS attacks last November, 2checkout has had some. Who is next?
The above is what I learned the hard way: NEVER rely on one merchant account. We have choices such as PayPal, NoChex (UK) and FastPay (UK) and the US probably has even more choices than us.
You have a nice no frills site and I have bookmarked it for future orders of Olivetti fax.lab cartridges. Took me forever some months ago to find some.
Thanks for your info.
Its all so new to me and I want to make sure I am doing the right thing.
Will have a look at nochex and fast pay too. Never thought about them but then my cart only allows paypal and worldpay.
Daniela
However, IMO that peace of mind comes at far too high a price to be commercially viable for most companies. 1% of turnover is a big deal. Far better to spend that 1% on preventing & detecting fraud in the first place.
1% is just too high, which implies to me that WP haven't got a sophisticated enough fraud detection system in place to be confident enough to offer it at a lower price (i.e. at a cheaper price they run the risk of losing money). Either that or they are playing on people's fears.
So my goods of up to £3000.00 to cover them I have to pay them £20.00 a month the fee for the service plus another 5.5% on top transaction fee along with the 4.5% standart transaction fee.
Helloooooo ..... &^%$&!
Thats 10% plus the fees..... Why even bother going online to sell? No way! So I will just do bank transfer for those items or not bother with them at all.
Sigh!
Daniela
VbV and MCSC is supposedly already set up by default on worldpay or will be very soon. I am not sure how it works. It appears that it is not compulsory for the customers to use it. It is only for those customers who have already signed up with their bank.
Perhaps you can contact Worldpay to see how and whether this service is available. You can then require all customers with large orders to use it.
You are right, Worldpay does have VbV, but not MCSC.
The only thing is that all of the orders will be covered regardless of whether or not the cardholder is enrolled. Visa is offering a 100% blanket cover on all cards regardless of cardholder enrollment. MC only covers on enrolled cardholders.
Like I said, Worldplay does offer VbV, but I wouldn't recommend getting it through them. You could easily get the same programs from a much better company that specializes in it. VbV and MCSC are some of the most complex programs in the world, and Worldpay is too caught up in their other business ventures to properly maintain the programs from update to update.
I suggest recieving the sevice from a prefered vendor recoommended by Visa who specializes in it singularly.