Best practices for preventing disputes

Learn how to use best practices to protect against disputes.

At Zip, we want merchants and our customers to have a great experience. When a dispute happens, it can be frustrating for merchants and customers. 

Creating an effective dispute prevention strategy that best suits your business can help prevent disputes from occurring. By employing some of these best practices as part of your overall strategy, you can avoid excessive chargebacks and reduce potential customer burden and losses.

Be clear and transparent with your customers

Clear and frequent contact with your customers can help prevent many of the reasons for disputes. By responding to issues and processing refunds or replacement orders quickly, your customers are far less likely to take the time to dispute a payment. Make your customer service contact information easy to find, keep customers updated throughout their order process, and provide updates about deliveries.

Require ToS Agreement

In general, you should make your terms of service and policies easy to find on your website, and require customers to agree to them. Rather than simply linking to them during checkout, provide a full version of them on the checkout page or as a pop-up with a requirement to agree to them prior to submitting the order.

Show complete policy

Card issuers can be very specific about how you present your policies. If you have a checkbox your customer must accept that only contains a link, it can be rejected as unsatisfactory evidence that your customer was aware of your policies. There must be reasonable evidence that your customer was presented with a full copy of your policies prior to their purchase.

Track shipping

When shipping physical goods to customers, use carriers and services that provide online tracking and delivery confirmation whenever possible. Provide this information to your customers as soon as it’s available (if you need to submit tracking information as dispute evidence, note that card issuers do not follow links so screenshots must be provided).

Update your business trade name 

The Business Trade Name you provide to Zip (and shown in the top left corner of your Merchant Portal) is the name used within the statement description on customer statements. Make sure this name accurately reflects the name you do business as or the brand name customers are familiar with. To update this name, please contact us. 

Use separate accounts for different brands

A Zip Merchant ID can only be used with a single website/domain name. If you have multiple brands or websites, contact us so we can set up additional accounts.

Collect as much payment information as possible

If you use our Gateway API, consider sending all available information when you authorize the transaction including: 

• Customer first & last name
• Customer email
• Customer phone
• Order shipping address
• Order billing address 
• Order line items

While these attributes are optional, including them can help Zip to detect potentially fraudulent transactions and allows us to pre-fill evidence fields in the event of a dispute. 

Prevent different dispute categories

Different dispute types have different best practices for prevention. See the dispute types for ways to prevent.