Chargeback question
 

This pertains to shipping of tangible goods.

I was told that having the customer's signature upon delivery virtually eliminates chargebacks. (Assuming everything else during the purchase process is 100% legal, etc.)

Is this true?

What about just delivery confirmation?

So long as the billing address is the same as shipping and you have a signature it is very hard (but not impossible) to get a chargeback.

The customer can still charge back for any number of reasons even with the above being true but your merchant bank will work with you and can usually resolve this issue and offer a refund rather than allowing the CB.

good question... what about delivery confirmation..

oops sorry. Delivery confirmation is not nearly as good as a signature and therefore harder to dispute. It does depend on too many things for a simple yes no answer.

Your merchant bank should be able to answer this for you no problem or if you don't want to ask would likely be listed in their agreement.

Ahh right, I forgot about billing same as shipping. I guess that is kind of a wild card.

Currently we're just doing delivery confirmation and i am waiting to see over time what our success rate is for disputing chargebacks. I'm considering spending the extra few bucks to add signature confirmation though if it makes it nearly impossible to successfully chargeback, as you mentioned.

The only complication there is that after 3 unsuccessful attempts at delivery, the package is returned and that then has to be factored into the equation. Not to mention people that just refuse to sign for it ...

When I sold goods if you don't have a signature, you can't even try to argue a chargeback. Delivery confirmation means nothing.

Problem is most people are not home during delivery times and if you ship a lot of items, it starts to become a problem because after three attempts, it get shipped back.

Carders/fraudsters will often send orders to shipping address' other than the billing address so they can pick them up there.

You best bet is to stick with delivery confirmation but require shipping to the billing address of the card only. This would cut down on quite a bit of fraud (friendly or otherwise)

I think that would be the best balance of protection for you and your ability to successfully dispute charge backs.

We've successfully fought back chargeback disputes on shipments by providing the scanned signature upon delivery from the courier or postal service. Some of them were pretty big in fact and were definitely worth fighting for when you know the customer got it. Only been able to do it with direct MID accounts where you have a closer relationship to the merchant bank.

The problem is a signature doesn't guarantee anything other than they got something from you. The customer could still say you sent a box of rocks and charge back. Again though this usually gives you the ability to at least work out a refund.

Brian I would just call up your merchant bank to find out what their policies are regarding each method and go from there.

brian, are you using usps or ups/fedex/dhl?

and when you are disputing the chargeback what other information do you send to dispute.. do you also send the IP address w/ time of transaction?

We're using USPS w/ delivery conf. at the moment.

We send the IP address, transaction info, a copy of our terms, basically everything.

My primary concern is affiliates' ability to be profitable in our system. Obviously requiring that billing & shipping info be the same would have a sizable impact on sales.

Thanks for your feedback man, I appreciate it. :thumbsup

i c..

dont most credit cards have the option to put multiple address on file.. im trying to think of reasons why ppl would have sometthing shipped to another address other than something shady, when they could add a legitmate other address to their card profile.

and the situations i can come up with are few and cant see how it could be a big impact on sales conversions?

I ship items to addresses other than my billing address all of the time. I would bet 75% of my purchases are like that... for a couple different reasons. I don't know about the typical consumer, but I'm sure a fair amount of them do something similar.

A policy like that, as a buyer, would be extremely annoying and I would look elsewhere before buying. As a seller, I can understand the need. Still annoying though.

Amazon will ship to pretty much anywhere you want.

Have you looked into chargeback resolution companies? I met a guy at Internext Florida who specialized in that, seemed like an interesting concept, they fight your chargebacks for you and take a % of what is recovered I think.

I find it super annoying but a lot of sites do do this... I do a lot of my online shopping when I travel to the USA for a show, and have the packages delivered to the hotel. I'm amazed at how many sites will not do it.

I thought about starting one of those when I first got into the business, just never did it :)

My CFO does a good job of following up right away on every dispute, I was just trying to gather info on what would be the best way to setup the system as a whole and mitigate CB's.

Yeah I don't see that as too viable of an option.

Given the nature of the products, I think a lot of guys have a secret P.O. Box to send adult-related stuff to and hide it from their wives, by and large those are perfectly good transactions.

A lot of military guys have their billing info stateside and ship to their APO address, those are 99.9% good transactions as well.

Faster Answer : NO.

The issuer bank , when the card is not present, will most always take the side of their client over the merchant.

i have no idear

Stop all the hassle and use verified by Visa. Every gateway can offer it for a small fee.

I deal with this all the time and on non-swiped transactions 98% of the chargebacks are lost no matter what signature you get !

Doesn't verified by visa require the user to enter in part of their social security # and get redirected to a 3rd party site, etc.? Are any adult-oriented companies using it? Sounds like a ratio killer.

And some customers, such as myself, refuse to utilize Verified by Visa because it shifts more of the liability (at least to the extent one has to jump through more hoops to get bogus charges removed) to the card user.

Ron

Switch to FedEx or UPS. Make sure that get a signiture instead of leaving it at the door.

You can fight it and win if you get a signiture, same address as on credit card as mentioned above. Do keep a negative database of customers and addresses that have tried to scam you.