[Gllug] [ot] borked net transaction

[John Winters]

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 16:14 +0100, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, t.clarke wrote:
> > Perhaps Tet would care to enlighten us as to actually what DOES happen if
> > you dispute a credit card transaction ...
> 
> I can tell you how it works from the merchant's point of view.
> 
> * Customer disputes transaction and tells bank.
> * Bank issues charge-back to credit card org (Visa, Mastercard et al)
> * Credit card org forwards charge-back to merchant's bank
> * Merchant's bank removes money from merchants account and issues 
>   charge-back to merchant
> * Merchant has 30 days to prove the transaction.  If it was a phone 
>   order, the merchant has no way of doing this.  The banks won't even 
>   accept the signed delivery slip.  In two years of working at 
>   mail-order business, we only ever successfully disputed chargebacks on 
>   mail order transactions where we had a signature.
> 
> Note: This was some years ago, and in Australia, but I have no reason to 
> believe it would have changed significantly.

>From my experience of running The Linux Emporium, that's exactly how it
works here too.

Mind you, in 4 or 5 years I had only 2 instances of actual chargebacks,
and for both of those the reason given was, "Non-existent card".
Neither was fraud - just typos by the customer in each case and we
eventually got the money - but the card company got very shirty when I
queried how this could happen.  There own blurb for merchants said
something like, "Just because you've had a transaction authorised it
doesn't mean you are guaranteed payment.  All it ensures is that the
account exists and funds are available."  It seems it doesn't even
ensure that.

The other cases where queries arose we managed to avoid the chargeback,
either by doing a refund ourselves where it was our error, or by
convincing the customer that it was his error.  In one case a company
had lost track of how many people in the company were using the one
company credit card to order things and so queried every single
transaction on their bill.  They accepted ours was correct when we faxed
them back their purchase order.

John

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