Okay, thanks for the info. One more question. You said:
> In a "card not present" transaction, unless you have a signature that
> matches the cardholder's, or something similar such a signed delivery
> receipt for physical merchandise, it WILL be a chargeback unless you can
> get the cardholder to drop his claim. End of story.
Does this mean that if the person is present with the card and does sign,
then there is no chargeback? If so, this is a valid justification to at
least get a swiper in my store, rather than doing it all via the web. The
scenario I had in mind if I just used charge.com would be that I could
just enter the customer's info via the web. However, if getting
signatures would prevent some chargebacks, that would be good. Of course,
it's not nearly as likely that someone would walk into my store with a
stole cc as opposed to faceless online customers.
Thanks again,
Cindy
On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Robert L Mathews wrote:
> At 8/8/01 6:50 PM, CDale wrote:
>
> >BTW, what kind of experiences have you guys had w/ merchants and
> >verification? I was told to verify myself to make sure, but a FNB guy
> >came by my shop the other day trying to sell me an account/equipment, and
> >he assured me I wouldn't get chargebacks, cuz FNB does verification.
>
> That's rich. He's either clueless, or lying to you. (Merchant account
> salesmen always say you won't be charged for something you will actually
> be charged a lot for. The challenge is asking enough questions to figure
> out whether they're doing it intentionally. Make a game out of it -- you
> can get literally seconds of enjoyment out of this.)
>
> Anyway, there is no way to avoid chargebacks. Chargebacks occur under
> VISA and MasterCard rules when the card-issuing bank (NOT your merchant
> services provider) refuses to pay a charge because the cardholder says he
> did not make the charge (among other situations).
>
> In a "card not present" transaction, unless you have a signature that
> matches the cardholder's, or something similar such a signed delivery
> receipt for physical merchandise, it WILL be a chargeback unless you can
> get the cardholder to drop his claim. End of story.
>
> Put another way, those VISA ads that tell consumers they'll "never have
> to pay for charges they didn't make" can say that because VISA never pays
> merchants for charges the customer claims he didn't make. (You didn't
> think VISA gave that money back to customers out of their own pocket, did
> you?)
>
> You'll occasionally hear merchants say they "fought" a chargeback; in
> fact, what they did is get the cardholder to drop his objection (perhaps,
> for example, when the cardholder sees a copy of an invoice provided by
> the merchant, he realizes he lent the card to his son to buy a domain
> name -- or perhaps the cardholder was lying, and a phone call from the
> merchant convinces him he might get caught). Unfortunately, that's rare.
> In my experience, 90% or more of all transactions where the issuing bank
> requests a copy of the invoice (so that the customer can review it) end
> up as chargebacks, and when I bother to look into them, they really do
> look like innocent people had their cards stolen (for example, they live
> in Idaho but the transaction came from a Russian dialup connection).
>
> Regarding the "verification", your salesman probably means address
> verification, or AVS, as someone else pointed out. This tells you if the
> address provided by your customer roughly matches the address of the
> cardholder. If it does, the charge is less likely to be fraudulent,
> because it means the crook had to get access to the cardholder's address
> as well as the card number. (If it doesn't, it's up to you whether you
> wish to proceed with the sale.) However, it's certainly not a guarantee:
> the chargeback will come if the customer says the charge was fraudulent,
> even if the address did match. (And you can't check most non-US
> addresses, anyway.)
>
> The answer to this problem, if you're wondering, is SET or a similar
> secure protocol. However, SET isn't going to happen, simply because VISA
> and MasterCard are making too much of a profit off the current system
> (for a start, they keep the commission on charges that are subsequently
> charged back). The credit card industry makes the Microsoft monopoly look
> like sweet children at play, and when I'm running the country, the
> government will crack down hard on it (there actually is a Department of
> Justice investigation into it, which I hope is ongoing, although that
> sounds like just the kind of thing they'd be killing right about now).
>
> --
> Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
>
--
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in
working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever
anything really meaningful to say.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
