This will give you a general idea of how to follow the money and transaction, which processes are taking place, and who's involved in an actual sale.
What's not reflected here that seems to always be an area of confusion is the "scrubbing" aspect of the billing process. This may help to clear up some of that confusion.
First of all, what is scrubbing? It is the process of trying to identify fraud or the "risk level" of a particular transaction given the data we've collected on our forms. We run the data through a number of different algorithyms to determine a "score" for the transaction. The score must be high enough for us to accept it and pass it along to the merchant bank for processing.
We check against past chargebacks & refunds in our system, along with all the rest of the verifiable data. If it passes our scrub, that does not mean the transation will be completed. It then goes to the merchant and Visa/MC network for approval.
Do we scrub "harder" at different times? Absolutely not. We do not adjust the scrub depending on chargebacks, or anything else. There are different scrub profiles depending on your business model (cam show sites have a different scrub than do pay sites - cam show sites may have the ability for multiple daily transactions whereas pay sites do not). If sales are down, and you're not sure why - I can assure you it isn't because the "scrub-o-meter" has been turned up on you.
Well - I've run out of time... but will continue this later. Hope this has been helpful - and certainly can field any specific questions, comments, etc... at my email
[email protected] or icq 17704874.
Have a great weekend all!!!!
Andy