[Silhouette]

If you expand outside paypal/ccs into other methods like direct debits (common for Germany) I would be curious to hear similar stories. Accidental chargeback rates are way up on direct debits so any stories for dealing with that efficiently would be very interesting.

Would you mind expanding on this, please? We're looking at different payment possibilities for a start-up and direct debits is one method that we are considering. This is the first time I've heard of a much higher chargeback rate on such transactions, though.

[jib]

If you are using direct debits you have no way of pulling the money directly from the account - you will always have some serious lag (day or two at least, often more). In that time you don't have a hold or similar on the funds, so either you delay giving product to customer or you have a few days where you trust him to actually have the funds available when your claim hits his bank. If he doesn't actually have funds at that time you effectively have a chargeback (no funds were actually available to take in the first place). Usually these are honest mistakes, especially if you do recurring billing that the customer may forget, but it's costly and time consuming to explain what happened and have the customers pay you again for something they actually want.

[Silhouette]

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. Innocent mistakes we can deal with. I was more worried about a high rate of formal disputes where customers might claim we took money fraudulently. It sounds like a track record full of that sort of thing can make it harder to get good terms in the future, and I didn't see why that should be significantly higher with one form of payment than another.