The straight dope on chargebacks?

I'm wondering what the industry standard is for dealing with paypal chargebacks. How do other sellers do it? From what I've gathered, having the buyer send as gift and attaching notes doesn't help. It seems that chargebacks are unpreventable if the buyer is really intent on it.

So far, the best I've come up with is to check the buyer's IP and address and stuff and make sure everything matches. This isn't perfect though. I've seen some sellers ask for ID, which should greatly reduce the risk except it's kind of unrealistic to expect a kid ordering $20 of gold to scan an ID. I figure setting that requirement will drastically lower my sales. It isn't really a reasonable request and makes the process 10x harder.

So then, how can sites like rsorder.com take straight paypal without any ID or anything? How do you guys do it?

Thanks.

 

Get them to provide ID, thats not blurred/easy to read.


You have a much better chance then.

 

I took straight paypal on thousands of payments and never once ID'ed someone. It's largely a useless procedure and turns a lot of people off of buying from you. Sure some chargebacks happen from hacked paypals but the large majority of your chargebacks and disputes will come from people just being dicks. Nothing you can do to stop that, so you just accept it as a cost of doing business

 

Firstly, I would like to say that there is no way to 100% ensure chargeback will not happen. However, you can do certain steps to better defend yourself and your business from it. You can minimize chargeback risk by using the service provided by maxmind.

https://www.maxmind.com/en/minfraud-services

With Maxmind integrated into your site, you can potentially reject payment automatically from a high risk order determined by their Risk score. The more people that uses their system, the better it gets as it has a database of flagged ips, stolen PayPal etc.

Not to mention, you can skip the ID verification process as it all runs in the background.

 

I've always thought gift was safe, but I was wrong. I've gone through and won chargebacks by giving, any sort of evidence that I could give, be it runescape screenshots to payment screenshots, some might be ignored yes, but they'll sometimes take it into consideration.

You can't run away from chargebacks when it comes to online transaction. Slim chance I would say, there will always be a risk of getting chargeback even when trading with high reputation members.

Like previous posts, ID scanning is a hassle it'll definitely turn down some buyers as it sometimes taken as a waste of time when they are intending to buy small amount and what not.

All the best and becareful who you are trading with.

 

Inb4 PlayerAuctions post

Yes, sadly the RuneScape community is a breeding ground for hackers, fraudsters, scammers and general scum. You just gotta take chargebacks as business costs

 

PlayerAuctions.

 

Having the buyer send as a gift and attaching notes doesn't guarantee your safety as a seller but it helps considerably more than doing it as a service/product transaction.

 

Asking for ID helps a lot but some people are unwilling or unable to upload pics of their ID, so as soon as you tell them to do it they'll just go find another seller. So you'll be safer but you'll also lose business.

PA gives you security but it also deters potential buyers because of the fees, the buyer ends up paying a LOT more. You can see many sellers on here sell rs3 gold around $0.43/m, but if you look at the prices of those same sellers on PA it jumps up to nearly $0.50/m.

 

haha. This was ace with a touch of clever.

@ OP, Divica is correct. You need to accept chargebacks as business cost if you opt for selling directly. As others have suggested, asking for a clear ID can be helpful, but it is not fool-proof. If the user pays with PayPal, but go directly to their issuing bank (which funded paypal) to initiate a chargeback, you are 100% out of luck and will automatically lose. PayPal has a dim view of individual merchants who transact in virtual goods, and will not fight a bank, on behalf of a seller.