Hi all,

I am not going to be doing webhosting as a career - only part time (ie not having loads of accounts, just accounts that cover the cost of the server).

Basically, I had sponsership with a gaming company in the UK where they paid for the server and I admined it.
They have now basically gone out of business/sold off most of the business so I am left with a server I have to pay myself.

I have been paying it without payment from the gaming company for 4 months (5 months mid July) and it is costing me a lot... so I gotta look into doing some webhosting.

Anyway, I have heard a lot of people say about people doing chargebacks - is there anyway you can fight chargebacks? I don't wanna get into a situation where someone buys hosting then as it is about to expire, they do a chargeback leaving me with a bill for it, and them using up bandwidth which I have to pay for.

What is the situation with chargeback?
Can you counter it?

Also are there any sites where you can get a template for TOC wording etc because I noticed on here loads of hosts hate it when u lift the TOC's from their sites.

Thanks

James

Theres nothing to fight chargebacks, the merchant always takes the responsbility.

Chargebacks aren't a big problem at all, If you voice verify all your clients, you will recieve 0 chargebacks.


If you don't, you might get 0.5-1%

Not too bad.

If you voice verify all your clients, you will recieve 0 chargebacks.

This is not true. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who know the system. No signature - No sale. This means they can chargeback. Just because you call to verify a sign up, does not guarantee no chargebacks. The only way to be sure is to have them sign a sales draft.

Hi James,

To prevent charge backs you need a signed copy in hard format from the credit card holder. You may add a form, of which your customer can print out, sign and fax it to you. I know it will reduce the number of sign-ups. But will ensure that all the sales you make are genuine and no one will be able to put a charge back.

You may also accept payment via cheques and money orders, and activate an account after the receipt of payments in your bank account. You will find few people are happy to pay by cheque or draft.

Regarding terms and conditions,

Of course any one will object if you copy their terms as it is and change the company name. If you find it useful have a look at http://www.m6.net/terms.asp and draft your own terms (referring our terms) as per your services, features...

PS: I have given the above link to our terms and conditions just for your reference and not approve you to copy as it is.

Thanks alot for all your help :)

m6.net - I will use your TOC as a basis to writing my own - thanks :)

--James

Why does nobody seem to understand this? Electronic signatures are LEGAL no matter what your local bank, or merchant set on screwing you out of money tell you.

Go here and read all about it:
http://www.nolo.com/encyclopedia/articles/ilaw/esignatures.html

Just because your bank tells you one thing doesn't mean it's true. Your getting information from somebody who set on keeping your money. After we all seen some of the people that work at the bank. :angry: Don't let people walk all over your rights.:uzi:

Hi!

This issue is quite intriguing. We are not hosting, but designing sites.

We accept credit card payments through a third party. That third party just pay us by check and we encash it. They just take little charge from our sales of course.

Their suggestion on chargeback is this: Always make it clear to your customers to contact you if they have problems. And make sure you are available when they do contact or email you. Fortunately the third party allows for a refund if customers are not happy about our service. Proudly we haven't receive any request for a refund.

What we do is we make it clear that we only offer 30-day full money back guarantee with no questions asked. After that no refund will be issued.

A refund is better than a chargeback.

Well, I hope I have said something of some value. And yes, electronic signatures are valid (at least in our country, in yours I dunno).



:)

Originally posted by ckizer
Why does nobody seem to understand this? Electronic signatures are LEGAL no matter what your local bank, or merchant set on screwing you out of money tell you.

It doesn't matter how legal electronic signatures are - when you sign up for a merchant account, you sign a contract, and that contract states that if you process a card where the transaction was not in-person (in other words, if you process a card without swiping that card through a card reader), you are responsible if that cardholder disputes the charge.

Does it help to get a signed document as Sanjay suggested? Yes. Is it a guaranteed way to fight chargebacks? No. Someone using a stolen credit card can forge a signature very easily. Even someone without a stolen credit card can claim that it isn't their signature.

Yes, electronic signatures are legal. No, electronic signatures are no defense against charge-backs because the contract you signed when you established your merchant account says that if you don't have the card present when you place the charge then it's not a guaranteed transaction. Signatures have little if anything to do with it - it's whether you held the card in your hand and ran it through the machine.

Bottom line - there are ways to minimize the number of chargebacks you get, but there is no way to provent them except requiring your customers to walk into your office and let you swipe their card through the card reader.

Jason

Originally posted by Jason Ellis
Bottom line - there are ways to minimize the number of chargebacks you get, but there is no way to provent them except requiring your customers to walk into your office and let you swipe their card through the card reader.

Even that is no guarantee. We require a paper signature for all credit card transactions, but we still get hit with chargebacks on occasion.

Although digital signatures may be considered legally binding and a standard algorithm for them was approved by the federal government in 1994, there is as yet no infrastructure for deploying digital signatures. And as long as there is no way for the digital signatures to be passed from user to merchant, the fact that they are legal is moot and the credit card companies don't have to worry about being expected to honor them.

Because the digital signature is just another encryption key, the dominant technology will probably be a personal SSL cert that works in tandem with the merchant's own cert.

can someone do a chargeback after 4 months? I have a customer who has made a chargeback after 4 months without even contacting us.

hi,

I think they can do it up to 6 months

--James

I've seen chargebacks more than a year after the initial charge was posted to the card. It's really up to the issuing bank as to what their time limit is on chargebacks -- if they feel a chargeback is legitimate two years later, they can and will do so.

Hello
I checked with Visa a while back and they have no time limit.

Someone can use your service for 10 months and move on.
We had a classic one today of someone charging back 6 individual monthly payments and a domainname charge as not recognised even though the person doing the chargeback has their own business web site on the space.

It goes back to one week before we started getting signatures.

Gordon

Someone can use your service for 10 months and move on.

I think we should have a web site where we can submit the details of these types of clients. Or do we already have one?

Originally posted by m6.net

I think we should have a web site where we can submit the details of these types of clients. Or do we already have one?
I agree with you because the same person could do it to anyone of us. We should publish all his details to make him think twice before doing it again.

http://hostabuse.com/

Thanks Chicken:D

What banks say & do and what the law is are often two very different things. Banks often make thier own rules which can contradict the law. Not sure how they get away with it but they do.

For example, last year I needed a signature guarantee on a form. A sig guar. is not a notarization! Just a guarantee that the signature on the form really is my signature. Only a financial institution (bank, stock broker, sometimes an insurance company) can do that, at least in the U.S. It's called the Medallion Program

The form and the transaction it described had absolutely nothing to do with the bank at all, just needed them to guarantee my signature.

They refused to do it. The bank manager insisted the bank has legal responsibility to look over the form, research the terms it describes and ensure the transaction described (which again had nothing to do with the bank!) was legal, proper, approrpiate for my situation and that I am capable of entering into the transaction. Total BS!!!!!

I went to another bank just down the street and they guaranteed my signature immediately. No questions, no problems.

We signed up for the WorldPay guarantee scheme - you pay £20/month + around 1.5% extra per transaction and as long as they approve the transaction and the chargeback is attempted fraud then they take the hit not you - we've only made one claim but it's paid for itself on that claim alone.

-- Chris

PS: I have given the above link to our terms and conditions just for your
reference and not approve you to copy as it is.


Now that was tacky...big deal, he uses your T&C's

Originally posted by Fred
Now that was tacky...big deal, he uses your T&C's Agreed. A fairly common practice.
Sites often share such things. After all; how many different ways can it be written?