A chargeback is when your acquiring bank itself directly sends the money from a sale, capture or rebill back to your customer (who, for whatever reason, feels wrongfully billed or otherwise dissatisfied). It is different, therefore, from a refund, and more expensive, because in a refund, you send the money back yourself, not your bank, which charges for it. As a merchant, you should try to prevent as many chargebacks as possible, by educating your consumers with clearly visible terms and conditions, supplying them with your customer service channel in advance, etcetera. Nevertheless, some chargebacks are bound to happen.
To view these unfortunate types of transactions (if you have any), click the Risk tab and select Chargebacks:
A list of chargebacks appears.
Chargebacks have the same “Transaction ID” as their original sale/capture/rebill:
Drilling down on a chargeback
There are a couple of ways to learn more about a chargeback on the list. The first way involves drilling down on the Transaction ID links, while the second involves the View button in the Actions column.
Quick view to transaction
The first path is through the “quick view” of a given chargeback:
Clicking on its blue Transaction ID, a window appears, giving you the original transaction and the chargeback that resulted from it:
From this window, if you want complete information on the original transaction, click the blue Transaction ID. This is a shortcut to the Transactions tab within the Processing menu:
From here, if there are further transactions connected to the original transaction—the one that resulted in a chargeback—then we can view them in the Related transactions tab:
View chargeback
Another way to drill down deeper on a chargeback is by clicking the View button in the Actions column of the chargebacks list:
When drilling down this way, the following screen appears:
In this Related transactions tab—and we’re still viewing the chargeback—not only puts our original transaction and our chargeback together on one screen, but we see that there is a request for information tied to our chargeback:
If we want to, we can View our rebill at this point, in order to drill down on the original sale, which we also uncovered in the previous example:
In this next example, when we view the Related transactions (when viewing our chargeback), we see that there is fraud information! That means that the original transaction was later deemed a fraud, thus the need for sending a chargeback to the consumer.
Chargebacks may also be seen by filtering your transactions in the Transactions-dedicated area of the Backoffice:
Go to the Processing tab and select Transactions.
Expand the Transaction parameters filter group:
In the Type field, select Chargebacks.
Click Filter.
Chargeback reason codes
Unlike the Results codes for credit card transactions, which are standard across the industry, chargeback reason codes vary per card scheme. We state the reason with the code whenever possible:
Please see the related article link below for a full list of chargeback reason codes.