Pre-chargeback info request

what information should be sent?

[Sunshyn]

A customer admits to having made a mistake. She'd forgotten about the sale and says she's contacting the bank to tell them so. However, it looks like we still need to respond to the information retrieval request, and I'm concerned that they'll take one look at the fact that it was a card not present and put the chargeback through. It's been awhile since this has happened to us, and we were only notified about the others after the chargeback was already put through. Obviously, we'd prefer to avoid paying chargeback fee if we can, especially since this one would cost almost the entire amount of the order.

Do I need to get something from the customer herself to send with this? Would a note from us stating that the customer was canceling the chargeback be enough? Any advice on how it should be worded?

[TallTroll]

This is a question for a commercial lawyer, I suspect. You're getting into murky legal waters when you deal with credit issues. Of course, if you bank is reasonable, it'll present no problem....

[upside]

I have been in this exact situation before and have managed to avoid a chargeback only when the client is cooperative. You are in a good situation because the client is on your side. Ask her to send you a signed statement authorizing the transaction and then submit that as your response to the RFI. Good luck.

[Sunshyn]

We did manage to get the customer to fax us a signed statement saying that she had dropped the claim. We sent it in with our documentation concerning the order, which was required within a week of us receiving the request. On the merchant's side or not, it can be difficult to get a customer to go out of their way to do something like that, especially within a time frame.

We haven't heard anything back but, given the delay from when the card was charged, we likely won't hear anything for awhile if there is a continuing problem. Our greatest concern was the fact that the information request we had to respond to came from the credit card company while the customer was dealing only with their issuing bank. That seems to leave a great deal of room for things to get confused, especially with the way the credit card companies look at card not present transactions.