How to minimise chargebacks

Start with why chargebacks happen. Genuine fraud is only part of the picture. A large share is friendly fraud, where a real customer disputes a real purchase because they did not recognise the billing descriptor, forgot a subscription, or found disputing easier than requesting a refund. Each cause has a different fix, so blanket measures waste money on the wrong problem.

Fix recognition first. Make your billing descriptor match your trading name, send a clear receipt immediately, and for subscriptions, remind customers before each renewal. These free changes typically remove a meaningful slice of disputes on their own because the customer was never angry, just confused.

Authenticate with 3D Secure 2. Strong customer authentication shifts fraud liability away from you on authenticated transactions. Modern 3DS2 runs frictionless checks on trusted payments, so the conversion cost old 3DS was famous for largely disappears. Every eCom Pay gateway includes it as standard.

Screen before you authorise. An AI risk engine scoring every transaction in real time catches stolen-card fraud before it becomes a dispute. The art is calibration: rules tight enough to block fraud, loose enough not to decline good customers. That is why our merchants get a dedicated Risk Analyst who tunes rules around their actual trading pattern rather than a generic template.

Fight the disputes worth fighting. When a chargeback lands, respond with compelling evidence: delivery confirmation, IP and device data, communication history, proof of authentication. Representment wins a healthy share of friendly fraud cases when the evidence pack is built properly, and we build it with you rather than leaving you a PDF guide.

Remove the chargeback mechanism entirely where you can. Open Banking payments are bank to bank transfers with no chargeback process at all, with authentication built into the customer's own banking app. For high value or dispute-prone transactions, routing even part of your volume through pay by bank changes your risk profile overnight.

Watch your ratios like the schemes do. Visa and Mastercard monitor chargeback ratios, and breaching their thresholds brings fines and remediation programmes. If your ratio is creeping up, act early. Our high risk team rehabilitates merchants in monitoring programmes regularly, and earlier is always better.