How To Prevent Your 3rd Party Merchant Account From Suspension


What would you do if you were sent an email from your online credit card processor telling you that your account has been suspended or frozen?How are you going to pay the bills in the meantime?It is extremely important for you to familiarize yourself with the terms of your contract with your credit card processor.As long as you comply with their set regulation and guidelines to maintain your account in good standing you should have no problems.

However, if for some reason you were faced with your account being suspended you need to know:

# what to do
# when to do it
# and what is the reason for your account being suspended in the first place

Factors Leading To Account Suspension!

# Persistent pattern of chargebacks.
# Poor or inadequate response to customers and a history of unresolved complaints or refused refunds
# Supplying faulty or inferior goods, not as described in your product description
# Entering customer credit cards yourself which goes against your merchant agreement

To protect yourself from unnecessary problems and disruption of your daily business you should use another third party credit card provider while you are making enquiries to restore your account.Make regular transfers of your earnings to your bank account and keep up to date records of all transactions.

10 Point Checklist To Prevent Fraudulent Orders

1. Do not use the same bank account to receive your earnings and for your daily essentials such as expenses, bills, shopping, etc. Use a separate bank account to deposit funds from sales and make regular transfers into a separate bank account.

2. Provide full contact details so that customers can contact you direct. Also make sure you return their messages in good time to avoid unnecessary delays and aggravation.

3. Make a clear statement in your terms and order page that customers should use their primary email address and not free email accounts. A high proportion of free throw away email accounts are regularly used to commit fraud.

4. Only allow orders to be shipped to the same address as the billing address registered to the customers credit card. Many cases of fraud use alternative addresses to get hold of goods without the original credit card holders knowledge.

5. Exclude delivery to known high risk countries. You can get this information from your credit card company. Use a pull down menu with a full list of countries eligible for delivery of your goods.

6. Consider setting a minimum spend value to help discourage fraudulent attempts to place orders for small sums repeatedly in the hope of getting goods with stolen cards.

7. Review orders manually to check if repeated orders have been made using the same credit card number.

8. Don't put all your eggs into one basket!Use a minimum of two or more 3rd party companies for orders so that you will always have at least one ongoing payment system to continue to receive and process orders.

9. Refuse shipments to P.O. Boxes. Request the full mailing address before shipping any order.

10. Put a hold on unusually high orders until further verification can be made such as a phone call to the customer.

Other areas to consider are to prevent the incidences of chargebacks.

What Are Chargebacks?

A chargeback is what is when a customer contacts their credit card issuing company directly for a refund of a payment. The credit card issuing company will claim back the full payment on the customer's behalf. For which a fee is charged to your credit card processing company. This cost will also be charged to you and you maybe subject to additional fees according to your provider.

This process can become a very costly affair if you as a merchant are subject to excessively high incidences of chargebacks. In severe circumstances too many chargebacks can cost you your merchant account. In this case your account will be frozen and inactive pending further investigation into all billing disputes.

In the case of fraud where a customers details were compromised you cannot be 100% sure of when or how this may happen until some time after the transaction. By that time you would have already shipped the product to the customer. In these cases you could stand to loose on the initial processing fees as well as the time and cost to ship the goods.

Top Tips

Conduct regular checks on your list of orders at regular intervals and mange your bank account and customer enquiries to the best of your abilities as a reputable merchant. Your continuing good standing as a reputable and trustworthy merchant will help your business as long as you maintain your daily business tasks to the highest standards and afford your customers the highest levels of customer support.

Maintain good bookkeeping of all orders so that you can track orders to verify the dates when an order was placed and any email contacts made to a customer for any disputes received.

This could help in cases where a customer has forgotten placing an order, or does not recognize the billing company name on their statements. You should also make it very clear on your order page and confirmation page as to the billing name that will appear on customer statements to prevent any confusion.

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