Merchant Account Avoid Potential Transaction Dispute

If you have paid or collected payments through the internet payment portals for the products or services, you might know that the people have rights to dispute or question any transaction that is made from their card or account.

This dispute of transaction basically has two steps to get initiated. One is when a customer asks for the reversal of transaction, this is called chargeback. Chargeback is when the customer asks for the refund of the transaction saying that the transaction is not valid. The cardholder’s bank asks the merchant’s bank to hold the amount from the merchant account due to chargeback. A Merchant can dispute the chargeback by providing the legitimate proofs of the transaction.

There is another thing that a customer can do is, asking for the proofs of the transaction, this is called retrieval process. A retrieval process can be called as the pre-chargeback process. As In retrieval process the validity proof of the transaction is asked first. This step generally takes place on the account of verification of transaction. Retrieval process can be initiated by customers or by the bank.

It is initiated as cardholder simply goes to the bank and questions the transaction. Now, the cardholder’s bank asks the merchant to produce the legal documents proving that the transaction is valid. Reason for questioning the transaction can be any of this: A customer asks for the dispute or retrieval, the bank finds inaccurate or less transaction information, bank observes that the transaction is an attempt of fraud. For all the mentioned reasons, cardholder’s bank asks the merchant for valid proofs regarding the transactions.

It is the responsibility of the merchant to give a response to the cardholder’s bank within the timeframe. If a merchant doesn’t respond within time, the retrieval request will automatically turn into chargeback with term “requested an item not received”. But, the chargeback request is not eligible for reversal of transaction if the merchant does not respond to the retrieval request. If the customer asks for the reversal of the transaction then only the bank credits the amount to the customer’s account.

There are only two ways a merchant can respond to retrieval. One is providing the valid transaction and order details that can prove that the customer was involved during the whole process of the transaction. This can be proved by providing the ordering date slip, the customer’s name, and order delivery address. The date of order and delivery both if possible, and also the record of any communication placed between merchant and customer.

The other way to respond to the retrieval request is to communicate with the customer, and asking the customer about what problem they are facing regarding the product or the transaction detail. It is the merchant’s responsibility to be active while solving the problem of the customer issues regarding any of the problem be it transaction or be its product details.