Yesterday, I wrote about a WSJ article on charge-back related fraud.

Later on, it occurred to me that some of the charge-backs by the customers may be unintentional, caused by the customer not recognizing the vendor name / transaction in the credit card statement. One of the stories in the article hints at such a possibility.

…two customers have asked for refunds when they claimed that charges on their credit cards didn’t belong to them. When he pointed to their IP address, both customers later discovered someone else in the household had made the order and allowed the charge to go through…

37signals, for example, claims to have reduced chargebacks by 30% just by making it easy for the customer to recognize the charge.

When someone buys something from us, this line item shows up on their credit card statement:

37signals-charge.com 800.xxx.xxxx IL

Visiting that URL takes you to this page where we explain the charge, the products, some suggestions if you don’t recognize the products, and a link to our billing support form someone needs additional help.

Here is an interesting article from Christian Holst on how to implement the 37signals solution for your webstore. The most interesting aspect of this solution is that it will cost you an afternoon of work and $10

Absolutely no reason to not implement this idea for your web-store.

Related Articles:

  1. 35% of fraud-related charges are charge backs
  2. Badcustomer.com – Legitimate? Appropriate?