[puchih]

Mike AI:
puchih that was a nice commercial, but we at Oprano want to know the real deal.

Mike & CJ,

I always give it straight. Ask me a fair question, I have fair answers. Let’s take your questions one by one.

What kind of solutions do you have specificlly for the US?

For reducing US-based chargebacks, we start by looking for a positive AVS & CVV2 response. If you've received a Visa chargeback with reason code 461 or a MasterCard chargeback with reason code 537, that should be enough for the acquiring bank to re-present the chargeback to the issuing bank. Of course, some acquiring banks will not act on this information, but others will. Before we take on any client, we have them send a registered letter to their acquiring bank to get a formal copy of the chargeback re-presentment procedures. We adapt our process to fit the specific acquiring bank of our client.

We don't stop there, however. For banks that don't accept AVS/CVV2 as proof, we contact the customer directly and we ask them to drop the chargeback and obtain a refund directly from us, the merchant. This approach frequently works. Again, depending on the merchant bank, we get the customer to send us an e-mail with his driver's license number as confirmation or, if the bank won't take that as proof of a customer's intent to drop a chargeback, we send the customer a pre-filled auth form by mail that he needs to sign and return to us. Once we get that, we send it to the merchant bank.

If we fail to reverse the chargeback due to the customer being uncooperative, we proceed with collection activity to recover the amount chargedback plus the chargeback fee. We start with letters from our in-house collection agency and we progress to registered letters from an attorney's office. Hope this clears things up about our process for US-based chargebacks.

You use the phrase "for some time now" what is that months? years? Exactly how long?

The company has been in business since April of 2002.

How do you charge?

We usually charge a fixed price per active-recurring member per month. For the purpose of an example, let's say your site finishes up the month with 1000 active members and your price is $1.50 per member. Your cost for that month would be $1,500. Of course, $1.50 is just an example. The actual per-member price depends on the number of services you buy and a number of other factors. We don't have standard pricing and it really depends on what the client is looking for.

Do you have a guarantee? What kind?

We do not have a guarantee for our Chargeback Combat service. We do guarantee a few of our other services. The reason for this is that the success rate is variable -- even if we used the exact same procedures for our clients. The reason for this is the acquiring banks and their chargeback re-presentment policies. If all banks offered a standard procedure for this, we could offer a guarantee.

Do you have references?

Some of our clients have been nice enough to volunteer to speak with our potential customers. I won't abuse that by posting their contact info in the boards, however. For serious inquiries we do provide references.

how does this work with a 3rd party processor? do you have a relationshp with them where they will share the information of an attempted chargeback with you before they simply press the 'issue' button? can it only be used with a merchant account?

Currently we are not working with any 3rd party processors. All our Chargeback Combat clients have their own merchant accounts. And no, we don't have any relationship with a third party processor to get their chargeback information. Since we have to be in direct contact with the merchant bank in order to reduce the chargebacks, we doubt any third party processors would allow us that kind of access, so we haven't asked them for it.

But if the reason people are holding off on a merchant account is due to a fear of chargebacks, I can assure you that they will be lower with the combination of Chargeback Combat plus a merchant account than they will with a third party processor. When our clients have a merchant account, we can really get active about fighting the chargebacks.

I wouldn't consider this to be that impressive, if the site only has 2000 members then its pretty easy to manage ... what about 5000 members, 10000 members, etc - do you have any experience with volume above 2000 members?

There is no difference at all between a site with 1000 members and a site with 100,000. The reason is that we approach each chargeback individually. When we're reversing a chargeback, the only thing that matters is the information that we have about that individual chargeback. Yes, we do have experience with sites over 2000 members. I was just using that as an example because we reversed every chargeback for that month. We were pretty proud about that. And remember, when you put all our clients together, collectivly, we're managing thousands upon thousands of members every month. So, even a site with 20,000 members is not a huge amount for us.

how much do you charge for your service?

I covered pricing on Mike's question. If you want me to have a look at your situation and give you a quote, please let me know.

what % of attempted chargebacks does your service eliminate?

Again, it varries from client to client depending on the merchant bank. As long as we're working with a reasonable merchant bank that gives us clear guidelines on their chargeback policies and follows through on their guidelines (i.e. if they tell us they'll reverse a chargeback with a cardholder e-mail, they actually do it once we produce that), we can do a good job for clients. I feel as though we've done a good job for clients when we reduce thier current chargeback ratio anywhere between 35-55%. I don't think this is an unreasonable target to shoot for, as long as we're working with a good bank. And yes, we exceed this with some clients who are very serious about chargeback reduction and are willing to do whatever it takes, such as callbacks for all new sign-ups.

i would imagine its quite significant as it would scare the shit out of someone about to commit fraud - that part i am very curious about.

We get some surprised phone calls once we start sending out collection letters. A lot of people pay after they get the letter from the attorney's office. That scares some people. But really, our goal is not to scare people. We are very polite with people until they refuse to work with us. We go out of our way to explain how the customer didn't need to chargeback at all and they can just get their refund from us.

Quite a few people are perfectly willing to go this route and there's no reason for us to get nasty with them. We only get forceful with people when they won't do what we ask.


I hope this answers everyone's questions about Chargeback Combat. If there are others, feel free to contact me or post it here. If you have a question specific to your situation (i.e. pricing for your site) it would be better to contact me so we can discuss in-depth what we can do for you.