One-time purchases, $34 each. Three disputes in the same month, all coded as unrecognised or unauthorised, and all three from people I am fairly sure genuinely bought it.
The email from my processor was polite but clearly a warning. How much trouble am I actually in and what do I fix first?
Boring fixes, in the order that gave me the biggest drop.
Statement descriptor first. Make it the name people actually remember, which is the product name, not your holding company. 'SP* NEBULA HOLDINGS LTD' is a chargeback generator because nobody recognises it three weeks later on a statement they are skimming. Most processors let you set it per charge.
Then a receipt email on every single charge including renewals, with the product name, the amount, the date and a link. Then a renewal reminder several days before anything annual bills. Then a cancel button that does not require emailing you.
The descriptor alone killed most of mine.
Separate the two failure modes, because they need opposite responses.
Friendly fraud - they bought it, forgot, and their partner queried the statement - is fixed by everything above: recognisable descriptor, receipts, easy cancellation, fast replies.
Actual card fraud looks different: clusters of small charges within minutes, mismatched billing geography, disposable email domains, odd hours. That is a rules problem, and the fraud rules product on most processors costs a few cents per screened transaction. Blocking a country you do not sell to at all is a one-line rule and takes a minute.
Given all three of yours are people you think really did buy it, you are in the first category and rules will not help.
Three on sixty is a small number behaving like a big one, so check for a common cause before you redesign anything. Same acquisition channel? Same day? Same discount code posted somewhere public? Mine turned out to be a single deal site whose audience bought on impulse and disputed at roughly ten times my normal rate. Cutting that one channel fixed the number without touching the product.
5% puts you straight into Visa's monitoring program. They will start assessing per-transaction penalties and your acquirer will drop you. You need to stop selling until you are back under 0.9%.
Not at 60 orders, and the difference matters because it changes what you should worry about.
The card network programs have minimum event counts as well as ratios. Visa's acquirer-side monitoring only starts counting your ratio against you once you are producing something on the order of a thousand-plus combined fraud reports and disputes in a month. Mastercard's excessive chargeback tier requires 100 chargebacks in a month alongside the ratio. Three is not in the same universe as either number, and the ratio on its own does nothing.
What can genuinely hurt you is your processor's own risk team, which sets its own thresholds, does not publish them, and is much stricter than the networks because they carry the loss. That is who emailed you. Answer them, tell them concretely what you are changing, and do it - that email is a conversation, not a sentence.
Refund on request, no questions, within minutes. Cheaper than the fee and vastly cheaper than the ratio.
@weatherfront_wu · 3w ago · 2 replies
Do the fee arithmetic before you decide to fight anything. A dispute costs you the transaction amount plus a dispute fee - $15 in the US last time I checked, and it varies by country so check your own rate. Since a change in mid-2025 there is also a separate counter fee for actually challenging one, and that counter fee is refunded if you win. The original dispute fee is not refunded either way.
So on a $34 order: lose it and you are out the order plus the fee. Fight it and lose, you are out more. Win it and you are still out the original dispute fee. Fighting sub-$50 disputes is a losing trade almost every time.
Refund on request, instantly, and never argue. The exception is a pattern of the same buyer doing it repeatedly, which is a different problem with a different answer.
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@carryon_cass · 4w ago
And reply to the customer's email within the hour if there is one. Two thirds of my early disputes were people who could not find how to cancel or could not tell what the charge was, and going to their bank felt faster than waiting for me. A dispute is very often a support failure that has been escalated by someone who ran out of patience.
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