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The bad part of credit card fraud is that the card network, issuing bank & gateways pass on the liability to the small merchant. There is always a looming risk of losing your account & business due to excessive fraud, something over which you have no control at times. If you become over aggressive with fraud protection, you risk not only losing revenue but pissing off genuine customers.

Your gateway would tell you that as a merchant, it's your job & responsibility to accept a charge & related risk of fraud. Well, if big guys handling billions of payments can't catch fraud, it's quite easy for a small guy to miss it as well.

When you are selling a digital product, it's very difficult to win a chargeback. Some low level bank employee hardly cares about your meticulous documentation & proof that you delivered the product.

3D secure is one way to shift liability to issuing bank but it only works for the first charge (not recurring subscription). There are lots of reasons for getting hit by incorrect chargebacks e.g. mistake on part of a customer because they didn't recognize, customer's card getting stolen midway during a subscription, unhappy customer who wants a refund after using your service for months etc.

I wish the industry would side with the merchant as well at times i.e. maybe a rating system to see how easy is the merchant's cancellation / refund policy etc.




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