May 27th, 2016 by Elma Jane
Refunds – transfers funds from your merchant account to the customer’s account.
Refunds are always associated with a transaction that has settled.
A settled transaction – is funds that have already transferred from the customer to the merchant. You can only refund a transaction with a Settling or Settled status.
The refunded transaction goes through the typical settlement process. As the refund settles, the funds are sent back to the customer’s bank account. It is normal for your customer to experience a delay because the customer’s bank may take a couple of days to deposit these funds.
Voids – will cancel the transfer of funds from the customer to the merchant and can be issued if the transaction is either Submitted for Settlement or Authorized. The original authorization should disappear from the customer’s statement within 24 to 48 hours.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: account, bank, customer, funds, merchant, merchant account, refunds, transaction
May 24th, 2016 by Elma Jane
Top terms in your Merchant Statement:
Interchange – are the variable fees charged by the card payment networks for processing transaction. Credit card brands set these non-negotiable rates based on card type, business size, and industry.
Ancillary Fees – this include statement, batch and customer service fees, monthly minimums and more.
Authorizations – this section shows the charges per authorization that come from an interchange plus provider and is then split by card brand and transaction type. On your statement, you will see these charges as either AUTH or WAT charges.
Deposit Summary – following the summary is the deposit summary, where lists of your account activity broken down by day and card type.
Discount Rate – every transaction percentage that is deducted as a fee. Rates are categorized as qualified, mid-qualified and non-qualified.
Processing Services – this states your discount rate charges that you receive from your interchanges plus processor. This is divided by card brand and sales volume.
Summary – summary shows the processed sales by AMEX, Discover, JCB, MasterCard or Visa, as well as the total fees paid in order to process these sales. You can find this at the top of your statement.
Other items included in the summary:
Account adjustments, chargebacks, the breakdown of sales by card brand and number of refunds.
Understanding these terms on your statement will give you the confidence to read your merchant account statement with ease.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: card, chargebacks, credit card, customer, fees, merchant, merchant account, payment, refunds, service, transaction
May 9th, 2016 by Elma Jane
Preventing double refunds depend on the timing of the chargeback. It is a bit challenging, the key lies in attention to detail.
A chargeback may already exist for the transaction when a customer say they just spoke to their bank. Merchants must pay attention to this big clue.
There are different time limits for resolving disputes before they become actual chargebacks, depending on the issuing bank.
- If customers indicate they did contact their bank, merchants need to call the issuing bank to determine if a case number has been assigned to the transaction dispute.
- If there is a case number that has been assigned, the merchant can disregard the refund request.
If a case number has not been assigned, merchants need to inform the bank that a refund has been initiated and a chargeback is not necessary.
Preventing Double Refunds Before Chargebacks are Filed
Provide prompt refunds to customers when they are warranted.
- Estimate when the funds will be available.
- Let customers know that a refund has been issued.
- Take care to ensure the credit isn’t process as a debit.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Travel Agency Agents Tagged with: bank, chargeback, credit, customer, debit, merchants, refunds, transaction
May 9th, 2016 by Elma Jane
Double refunds are when a customer is provided with two refunds for the same transaction. Chargebacks can be involved in a double refund.
Double Refunds Happen When:
Chargebacks are filed after a refund is issued. The consumer contacts the merchant and requests a refund, but the funds aren’t returned immediately. The consumer thinks the request for the refund was ignored and files a chargeback. Then both the chargeback and the refund are being processed.
Chargebacks are filed before a refund is issued. The consumer calls the bank and initiates a chargeback. Then, the consumer calls the merchant and expresses dissatisfaction. To try to avoid a chargeback, the merchant provides a refund. However, the merchant has no idea of the fact that a chargeback has already been filed because the consumer calls the bank first
Even thou a merchant provided a refund with a customer that doesn’t guarantee that a chargeback won’t be initiated. Same thing with chargeback that has been filed doesn’t guarantee that customer won’t contact the merchant and demand a refund as well.
Just because a merchant provided a customer with a refund that doesn’t guarantee that a chargeback won’t be initiated. Same thing with chargeback that has been filed doesn’t guarantee that customer won’t contact the merchant and demand a refund as well.
It is possible for the customer to receive a double refund for the one purchase transaction.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Travel Agency Agents Tagged with: bank, chargebacks, consumer, customer, merchant, refunds, transaction
January 2nd, 2014 by Elma Jane
Online consumers generate an avalanche of data.Companies such as Amazon and Target have used Big Data for years. It’s the secret behind their highly personalized product recommendations and email promotions.
The good news is that smaller companies can use the power of Big Data in their businesses, too. But just because you can gather tons of data, doesn’t mean you should. For most small-to-midsize businesses, trying to harness Big Data can sometimes do more harm than good. It can slow down your website and cost time and money.
To make effective data-driven decisions in your business, control the types of information you collect. Focus only on the metrics that truly affect conversion rates and ignore the ones that don’t have much of an impact.
Tracking raw ad impressions regardless of whether they yield clicks or conversions is an example of monitoring low-impact data. The same thing goes for blindly monitoring Facebook Likes or Klout scores. Stop wasting resources on metrics like these. Devote your efforts on the data points that count.
Here are the most important ones for e-commerce merchants.
Number of Site Visitors and Where They’re Coming From
Online marketing is rarely cheap and quick. You have to determine the best strategies to spend resources on. There are several free and easy-to-use tools that can provide this information.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool that gives you insights on your traffic and traffic sources. To go deeper, such as which specific newsletter or which Facebook update sent visitors to your site, you can create Custom Campaigns and add special URL tags for each campaign. This lets you drill down on the specific source for your referral traffic.
Also, set up your online campaigns to make it easy to monitor. For example, having a different landing page for each guest post will allow you to quickly see which ones are sending traffic. Or, for social media, you can publish updates using a simple tool like Buffer so you monitor clicks each from each post.
Sales and Beyond
Tracking your sales is key. Aside from looking at your basic sales numbers, compute your average order value and compare it with your marketing and advertising budget. Viewing how much you’re spending on each customer versus how much they’re spending on you will help create the right budget for customer acquisition and retention.
Beyond gross sales, monitor item returns to obtain the net sales volume. Determine also the reasons behind refunds and exchanges to improve your merchandise.
Also, track sales from promotional offers, to know what promos or discounts to provide in the future. If, for example, you used a loss leader to attract customers into your store, closely monitor overall sales based on that offer to see if it generated profits.
Knowing this sales data will enable you to send out tailored promotions to users. And if you can combine those insights with other data such as the time they usually buy from you or what device they use you’ll be able to optimize your campaigns for maximum conversions.
What Visitors Are Doing on your Site
Tracking the pages that users viewed, the actions they took, and their exit points can give you tremendous insights about your site and your visitors. Analyzing these things will tell you which aspects of your site need improvement.
For example, say you discovered that while shoppers are clicking the “add to cart” button, most leave before they provide their credit card details. This could mean that there’s something wrong with your checkout page. Perhaps it’s confusing or you need a stronger guarantee. Regardless, you won’t be able to identify the problem if you don’t track what’s going on.
How you track user behavior will depend on what you want to measure. If you want to track your exit traffic, for example, to add outbound link-tracker code to your website. For WordPress sites, this can easily be done using the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin.
On the other hand, if you want to track how users react to specific site elements such as buttons, text size, forms, and other key elements use heat maps that give you a visual representation of user behavior. Crazy Egg offers a solution for this. It enables you to see how people are behaving on each page.
Posted in e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Internet Payment Gateway Tagged with: acquisition, Amazon, analytics, big data, campaigns, conversion, credit-card, data, data-driven, e-commerce, email, exchanges, Facebook, google, insights, online, personalized, refunds, resources, sales, target, wordpress
