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by jasonlotito 2929 days ago
6.5% chargeback rate.

This entire blog post reads like other posts of its type from people who don't understand credit card processing or how it all works.

"Shortly after sending the above information we discovered that the specific charges flagged as fraudulent were not fraudulent charges. They were, in fact, due to chargebacks related to a recently acquired eCommerce store where fulfillment was lagging heavily during the transition which led to some dissatisfied customers who opted to dispute charges."

No, the transactions weren't fraudulent. However, selling something and not delivering is grounds for a chargeback and would be labeled as fraud, and to any reasonable person, would be considered fraud.

"Somehow we moved from an issue of fraudulent activity to whether or not we’re allowed to sell specific products."

Yes, because with such a high chargeback rate, they are going to reevaluate your entire business. It's called Know Your Customer (KYC), and it's critical.

But seriously, 6.5% chargeback rate. Even when I was still working in an industry know to be high risk, I never had a rate that high.

"Stripe is quick to put all blame and responsibility on us by claiming that it is not their responsibility to prevent fraud."

Because in the end, yes, that's where the fault lies. Don't believe me? Go to a bank and get your own merchant account and see what happens when you just let whatever you want go through your system. Just because it's on a computer doesn't change the fact that you are responsible for the fraud you are swiping through your system.

tl;dr: a legit 6.5% chargeback rate.

2 comments

Actually a 44% chargeback rate by volume!

It only takes a little bit of reading between the lines to see the author bought a site that sold fraudulent gear, didn’t realise this for a bit and then shut it down.

If stripe hadn’t frozen payouts they would be stuck holding the bag for 44 percent of the total charges in the account.

The new account thing does sound beuracratic but I guess it restarts the KYC process.

I worked for a high-risk merchant, and a 44% chargeback rate is utterly insane. IIRC, internal alarms would go off and the processors would be breathing down our necks if the chargeback rate started to approach 2%.
I've pushed $600K through stripe with >7K orders and only had 1 dispute, ever.

OP is definitely in the 'fraudster' category, and deep into it! I am surprised Stripe didn't flag way sooner.

Stripe held our payouts when we got over 1%.

If you get put into a monitoring program, it gets real expensive, real fast. Though Stripe would probably rather just ban you.

https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/monitoring-programs

> the author bought a site that sold fraudulent gear, didn’t realise this for a bit and then shut it down.

I don’t think that’s the case. It looks like they bought a flipping or drop ship site and they botched the transition process; orders weren’t getting fulfilled and customers were rightfully pissed about it, hence the chargebacks.

Stripe has a lot of rough edges once you have to talk to a person due to outlier activity, but this could’ve been mitigated by isolating businesses into their own Stripe accounts, as well as better handling the business acquisition that took place.

I mean, if you're selling branded products that you don't actually have available to give to the customer, aren't able to get quickly, and don't even have the legal rights to sell anyway, and then customers start filing chargebacks... that's kind of entirely on you.

Also keep in mind that for such a large number of users to go through the trouble of filing the chargebacks, it means that A) it's been long enough that they seriously believe your shop is fraudulent and you have no intention of shipping them what they paid for, and B) your communication and customer support is so terrible that they felt this was their only recourse.

There is no requirement for me to have an agreement to sell a branded product (first sale doctrine). If I go buy a cargo container full of North Face gear on clearance, there is nothing North Face can do to stop me from legally selling that gear.

Agree with the shipping delay points.

Since most of the cargo containers of north face gear on "clearance" are actually fake product, believe it or not they can absolutely shut you down.

We really need to call out these types of scammers better. Nothing you can do to stop me selling my crap fake "Apple" charges on amazon (amazon should be doing a much better job screening), my "ecommerce store" that is experiencing "fraudulant transactions" == trying to scam users by not shipping anything, too I bought a container of "north face" gear from china and there is nothing you can do to stop me.

In all these cases, the seller had a reasonable ability to think - hey, this is probably a fraud and stop doing what they are doing.

Seriously, for reputation reasons North Face and many other brand retailers do not sell containers of product on "clearance" to rando third party retailers.. Some even destroy amazing amounts of product to avoid to entering into this scammy reseller chain.

You’re moving the goal posts. Counterfeit goods, entirely legal to shut down the sale of. Authentic goods, you cannot. It’s up to the brand to prove they’re not authentic goods being sold and pursue the necessary channels to shut the seller down.
The problem is that many people, after exhausting the cargo container, don't bother to take down the listings and continue to take orders in the hope that they'll stumble on another cargo container for cheap.
Business is hard and fraught with peril.
I would count myself in the category of people who don't know exactly how this all works, but this email[0] makes it sound even worse by the end:

> We calculate the dispute rate a number of ways, but the two most common are:

> 1. The percentage of charges on your account that have been disputed (you are currently 23.74%)

> 2. The percentage of volume on your account that has been disputed (you are currently 44.82%)

[0]: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*8f0gZoASFf20_-lM.

These rates are generally dictated by the card companies. We recently had a spike in chargebacks in one of our Stripe accounts, which put us over the warning threshold.

Stripe could have handled it a lot better. They withheld payments from us (over 250k) No notifications, or anything else. They waited until we contacted their support on why our payouts weren't processing before they lectured us on how we should be doing fraud review (we do. We also pay way to much to SiftScience to mitigate that as well)

tl;dr though, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, etc... all have their own hard limits.

And for others who aren't aware - the standard Visa threshold is 1%. [1] Supposedly with a warning at 0.75% from Visa and at 0.5% from Mastercard.

If you go above that, Visa reserves the option of "potential disqualification from the payment system" [2]. That is, you can be banned from accepting Visa cards ever again.

[1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/changes-to-visa-charg...

[2] (see "Chargeback Compliance Program") https://www.citibank.com.sg/gcb/credit_cards/pdf/Fraud_Charg... [PDF]

And this is over the lifetime of the account!
I notice that this image was removed from the article as well.
That's disturbing. I distinctly remember seeing that image too when I read the article.

Thank you faitswulff for preserving the text at least for posterity.

I dug it out of my browser cache and uploaded it to imgur:

https://i.imgur.com/1CQkZPF.png