Refund the dispute before it becomes a chargeback.
When a cardholder complains to their bank you normally find out weeks later, when the money has already gone. Alerts tell you within hours, while you can still do something about it.
The fee is the smallest part of it.
A chargeback takes the sale, the goods and a fee of $15 to $100 on top. That is the part merchants notice.
The part that closes accounts is the ratio. Visa and Mastercard both run monitoring programs, and once your disputes pass roughly 0.9% of transactions you are in one. That brings fines, mandatory remediation and eventually termination, which follows the business to its next processor and makes the next account harder to get.
Alerts work on that ratio directly. A dispute you refund never becomes a chargeback, so it never counts.
Three steps, and the middle one is yours.
The alert reaches us
A cardholder disputes a sale with their bank. Before it becomes a chargeback, the alert networks tell us, usually within hours. We get the amount, the last four digits, the date and the descriptor they saw.
You refund inside the window
It appears in your portal with a countdown. Refund the sale in your own system, then tell us you have. The window is short, often 24 hours and sometimes 72, which is why it lands in a portal rather than an email nobody opens.
The dispute stops there
No chargeback. No chargeback fee. Nothing counted towards the ratio the card networks watch. We report the outcome back for you, so the alert is credited properly.
Cover across the networks that matter.
Ethoca alerts
Mastercard’s network, and most major issuers. The broadest coverage of the three. Live in about 5 to 7 days from enrolment.
Verifi CDRN
Visa’s dispute resolution network, working the same way: you are told, you refund, it stops. Live in about 5 to 7 days.
Visa RDR
Rules based. Visa refunds qualifying disputes automatically, before anyone has to do anything. Takes about 14 to 15 days to set up because Visa run the enrolment themselves.
TC40 fraud data
Issuer-reported fraud on your account. Not something you act on, but the earliest warning you will get that something is going wrong.
What alerts do not do.
They do not cover every dispute. Coverage depends on whether the cardholder’s bank participates, and you pay per alert whether or not you would have won the case at representment.
For a merchant with two or three disputes a month it usually is not worth it, and we will tell you that rather than sign you up. The merchants this pays for are the ones running a meaningful dispute rate, or already carrying a warning from their processor.
We confirm pricing and expected coverage in writing before anything is switched on. Creating an account commits you to nothing.
The ones we get asked.
No. You decide. If the sale is genuine and you would rather fight it, tell us that instead and we record the reason. That matters, because the alert networks credit alerts differently depending on the outcome reported.
Usually within 24 hours for Ethoca and up to 72 for CDRN. The portal shows a countdown on every alert and flags anything that has run out of time.
Only if you ask us to and put it in writing. We would rather you did it in your own system, because you can see the order and we cannot. If you want us handling it, we assign an account manager and agree the authority first.
That is fine. Protection works alongside whoever processes your payments. You will need your descriptor and a couple of identifiers from your statement.
Ethoca and CDRN in about 5 to 7 days from enrolment. RDR in about 14 to 15, because Visa run that one. Until each goes live nothing changes, so keep handling disputes the way you do now.
Stop paying for disputes you could have refunded
Four fields to create your account. Then we ask for your descriptor and a couple of numbers from your statement, and we take it from there.