"WE FIGHT CHARGEBACKS!" | Mark Wagner CEO of Disputifier!

You are now watching the Biz to Biz Podcast with Allen and Justin. Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Jean-Claude Van Damme of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we got a special guest by the name of Mark Wagner from Disputifier, uh, located down in Austin, Texas. Well, up in Austin, Texas from us. Uh, well, I guess, yeah, up into the west.

Yeah.

And, uh, so we'll be talking to him about chargebacks and, and a few other things and hear his story. Uh, looking forward to it. How you doing, man?

Doing good. Busy week.

Busy, busy. How was your, uh, trip to Orlando? Yeah, how was that?

Very good. Informative. Learned some new tricks, new— learned about some of the features of the point of sale for their restaurant and bars, ways for them to get more data, easier ways to fight chargebacks, help them get their data out of the system faster.

Nice.

With less work. So there you go. I was very excited about that.

Word up. Well, Shane on a chargeback.

Chargebacks are a pain in the butt.

There he is. What's up, Mark?

How's it going? Doing well. How about you guys?

Not bad, not bad.

Amazing.

I like the view, bro. Is that— is that the view of your— that's nice.

Yeah, thank you, thank you. Just a little home office right now, but, um, Yeah, dude, I like the studio you guys got going on.

Thanks, man. Thanks, thanks.

Yeah, you got to get you a neon light.

I do, I do. Yeah, I don't know if it would like stay up on the window, but you know, we'll give it a shot. Put a little Disputifier logo up there.

Get a nice— just get a decal, like a sticker, stick it on the window.

Oh, see, this is smart. I think the neon sign's a little cooler, but, um, that's okay. You guys will just be cooler than me.

Yeah, yeah. So before we hop into it, man, tell us a little bit about yourself, like how you, you know, how you just, you know, got into the entrepreneur lane, you know, what made you want to start your own business, things like that.

Yeah, totally, totally. So I have been selling products online for most of my life, um, you know, before I even considered it a business, just like, you know Started off flipping sneakers like Nikes and—

Nice.

—kind of transitioned into selling car accessories, car parts, stuff like that. From there, started selling home decor. I was just always selling stuff online. There you go. Always had a little hustle. As those hustles got bigger, I just eventually found issues with chargebacks within my business. And tried to fix those issues, use some like platforms, softwares out there and just had such terrible experiences. I basically decided to start my own and a couple of years later, here we are. It's, you know, the only thing that I'm doing now is just helping other businesses to fix their problems with chargebacks.

Cool, man. So how long you been doing it?

So I started Disputifier in 2020, about, I guess, 4 years or so at this point. But, um, it's been a fun journey. Definitely wasn't, uh, wasn't easy.

I hear you. I can hear you, man, loud and clear. Yeah, man. So, uh, you— are you from Austin, Texas, or where are you originally from?

Yeah, initially I'm from North Carolina. Oh, cool.

Yeah, not too far away. Yeah, I know, right?

A little East Coast there. Um, that's—

you know, I was just, uh, talking to the— to Sean, the videographer for us, and, uh, he— we were saying he was in Charlotte, and I've never been anywhere near North Carolina. So I'm definitely interested.

It's popping, it's popping, it's definitely expanding.

So what took you to Austin? What, what, just business opportunities, school, what?

Totally, yeah. I think Austin has a great entrepreneurship community here, so just, you know, wanting to be around inspiring people, and it's got a good energy, you know. I don't know if you guys have ever been down here, but, um, no, I haven't. Austin's a nice spot for sure. Let me know if you come out. We'll get some. Definitely will.

Yeah, I used to live in Dallas and I've been to Austin before. I like— yeah, I know that, you know, we get, we get a lot of inquiries from tech companies located Austin.

Well, South by Southwest is down there, so like, ever— it's like ever since South by Southwest chose Austin, Texas, it's kind of created this whole tech hub industry. It's really been flourishing, you know. I, I I've always wanted to check it out, but you know, I got kids and, you know, life of my own and just never really, uh, worked out. But maybe in the future soon. Now I know you, Mark, you're in Austin, so you know what I mean? So maybe I'll come and check you out.

Absolutely, sounds good.

So let's hop into it, man.

What you got for him? So tell, tell us, like, you know, so I've been in the business, the payments side of the business, since 2001. And, you know, when you— chargebacks, when I first started— Mark will probably start laughing— was merchants got a 3% limit. I mean, that would be awesome today, right? And then it went to 2%, then it went to 1%, then it went to 0.7, and now it's at 0.5. So a half a percent. So merchants— what does that mean? Yeah, so what that means is one if you have 100 transactions, you have one chargeback, you're at 1%. Okay, so you got to really be scaling, scaling your business. And part of the issues that people are running into— I mean, me and Mark have little discourse on LinkedIn about stuff, you know— is, um, especially since COVID you know, dropshipping became hugely popular., right? Hugely popular business, and the, you know, delivery times can really affect chargebacks. Okay. And Mark can shed a little light on that.

100%. Yeah, there's obviously a ton of reasons that businesses can get chargebacks, shipping times being one of those, um, and also friendly fraud too, you know. Like, I think a lot more customers have just realized that it's pretty easy to get free stuff, you know, you just click a couple buttons and then you get a refund. And, um, they don't really think about the impacts that has on the business. So yeah, I mean, it seems like there's definitely a big explosion in chargebacks ever since COVID and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.

Yeah, the friendly fraud issue is because the, the card issuers have made it so easy. You just go into your app. Yep. Go into your— go on or go online to your bank, click a transaction. I mean, not so easy with a debit card all the time, but with credit it's really easy. Click a button, say I didn't get this, or I came broken, or whatever. And they don't really make the customer reach out to the, to the business. But, you know, also businesses need to make it easy for the customer to reach them by communicating shipping times, by having a phone number that's answered 24 hours a day, right, answering service. I mean, that's one of the things like we'll tell customers, okay, because we do a lot of like, we'll find a customer, they'll have 1, 2% chargebacks, and then we're like, okay, well, what, what caused this to happen and how can we remediate it? So one of the, you know, we go through the steps with them of, you know, identify the problem. Can that problem be fixed? Most of the time, yes, through answering service, using MARC service. Doing things like RDR. Explain RDR a little bit, Mark.

Yeah, totally. So RDR stands for Rapid Dispute Resolution, which basically just means that the customer can essentially get a refund automatically instead of going through the traditional chargeback process where the customer still gets a refund except the business kind of fights the charge back typically and tries to win that money back. So instead, with RDR, the business typically kind of accepts the loss, and in exchange, the dispute doesn't count against their ratio. So like, obviously everyone wants to stand there, whether it's 0.5%, 1%, whatever. And RDR kind of allows businesses to do so while, you know, still making sure that the consumer is protected and gets their, gets their money back.

And it kind of works well, like if you have a SaaS product where you're not— or a lower priced product, because, you know, you don't want to— let's say you're selling something and it's $20 or $30, all of a sudden you're going to get hit with a $20, $30 chargeback fee, and then you have an employee fighting it. Is it easier just to let that— let them do an RDR and then just basically put that that consumer on the, the shit list. Yeah, yeah, they're blacklisted. They can't buy on your site anymore, you know, blocking them, you know, block them out of your site so that they don't come back and do it to you again, which is mostly very, very important. But that can help a lot of businesses because if you're fighting a bunch of these small tic-tac-y chargebacks, you have an employee spending 30, 40 minutes, you know, finding the data and then typing up a letter and sending it in. Is that worth the time or is it just easier just to let it go?

What are some suggestions you got for, you know, small businesses to help, you know, prevent chargebacks or, you know, obviously you're not going to be able to stop it all. You got people out there scamming like we said, you know what I mean? But, you know, what are some good tactics that a business can implement, you know, like on their website or, you know, just best practices?

Totally. Yeah. So if we're talking like website payments, like kind of, you know, card not present, I guess is what it's traditionally called, then definitely having some sort of like fraud tools in place is essential because you never know when your site's going to get hit with a fraud attack. Like, you'd be surprised, you know, these small businesses can get targeted and they can just get a ton a ton of fraud out of nowhere. So having some sort of tools in place to help with that, um, is really, really important, I think. And I think that goes beyond the, like, the gateway settings, right? So like the Authorize.net, you know, reject if AVS equals no, like, that's great, but it's really not enough. Um, I really think all small businesses, and big businesses for that matter, need to have like a a real true fraud analysis system in place. That way you can catch like, you know, the, the people that are legitimately trying to scam you, right? Because that's going to hurt the most if it's one customer, you know, it's kind of okay. But if it's like a targeted attack where you get 50 orders in 2 days, you know, and they all turn into chargebacks, that's going to hurt for sure. So bare minimum, definitely implement some software to, um, you know, scan your, your orders for fraud.

Even like, you mean like, like a plugin or something like that? Some sort of extension to add on? So I, I agree, you know, WooCommerce has— I'm a WordPress dude. I'm, you know, I've been building websites for over 15 years. Yeah. Um, but so like, you know, WordPress, you know, they have tons of, you know, security extensions, especially dedicated just to WooCommerce. So I'm sure Shopify and all those other ones do too.

Yeah, one of the things is like the— definitely the velocity settings, like on Authnet and other gateways, NMI and others, have gotten better. You know, like, oh, if you see transactions from the same IP address, uh, the same email, you know, account, um, or, you know transactions that happen too fast, right? You know, so you know that they're being roboted. They've come up with ways to kind of stop that from, from those kind of things from happening. And, and that's like super important. And also not leaving like your pay— making people like check off checkboxes so that it's not that easy for someone to like put a robot onto your shopping cart and start roboting the shopping cart. So those are the kind of things that, that people really need to watch out for, because having like a wide open page, those are the ones that get hit all the time. Yeah, checkboxes and, you know, a little extra step to check out can, can, uh, get rid of the thieves.

100%. Yeah, it's funny, like, you would— you wouldn't think that small businesses would really be a target, but they absolutely are. And maybe I think it's because small businesses don't have good systems in place to kind of catch fraud, whereas the larger businesses probably are a harder target. So yeah, I mean, bare minimum, definitely, um, you know, take some time to, uh, investigate how you block fraud and make sure you got some systems in place there.

I always tell people, like, check the shipping addresses, you know. Like, some of the bigger merchants will subscribe to, like, Whitepages or one of those services that tells them like, oh, this is a UPS store, this is some sort of mailbox location. And, you know, I just tell businesses, you know, be smart. Like, we had a cigar merchant when they first started with us, had a ton of fraud. Like, no one's going to order 10 humidors at $600 apiece off of a website. Yeah, I mean, you might, they might, but, you know, and it was going to a UPS store. And then we just tell them like, hey, review your batch, you see a large order, call the customer, and they put a system in place.

Well, that's right. Like, to go with Mark said, that's why small businesses do get attacked, because people, they don't, you know, it's typically like myself or like yourself when you were first starting just operating this, you know, online store. So no one's monitoring. They're like, holy shit, I got 50 orders last night. They're happy, they're shitting bricks, like, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like Finally, they made some money only to realize that they've been, you know, played. They— and, you know, they played themselves as well because they're not paying attention. You know, they're just, you know, really doing— so yeah, man.

Yeah, you gotta pay. Small businesses have to pay attention. Big businesses need to pay attention too. A lot—

they already got that stuff in place. Yeah, somewhat.

A lot— you'll find big businesses, they'll get, you know, they'll make one little— one, they'll have one little opening on their site, and then all of a sudden, you know, the problem is, is you got social media and you got sites like a Reddit, or where there's these private chats everywhere, the dark web, right? And, you know, they go say, oh, this website, you can exploit this website, right, and get free stuff. And they go tell, you know, once somebody figures that out, they go tell 10, 20 other people, and that's where the fraud happens.

Yeah, you know, unfortunately, 100%, it's a, it's a never-ending game to just kind of like, you know, you shut one thing down and then they like slightly modify and, you know, push it through. It's, it's definitely a never-ending game against the fraudsters. But, um, you know, luckily technology is getting better, um, which makes it harder but also makes it easier, you know. So, um, yeah, definitely, um, having some sort of tools in place for fraud I think is number one because obviously most chargebacks are fraudulent, you know, the vast authority. And then if you're getting chargebacks outside of that, you know, product not received, product unacceptable, subscription canceled, typically almost all that can be remediated with better customer communication. You know, just like being more transparent on your website, your post-purchase emails, you know, how do you keep the customer informed on the delivery of their order? All that stuff can really, really help because most chargebacks are just customers that get a little too antsy and then, you know, they just file something with their bank without really taking the time to, to reach out to the company. So just the more proactive communication, the better, in my opinion, right?

So we, we, we, we like to tell merchants too to have like, uh, clear payment policies, privacy policy, shipping, uh, and, uh, return, you know, all very clickable and accessible on the website. Do you, you know, that, that's also good.

And also, like, when they're checking out, you know, have a checkbox. Like, if shipping times are 7 to 10 days, make sure they check the checkbox so that they see it and it's not in, like, you know, number 2 font. You know, have it in a nice size font, you know, and they know, like, oh yeah, this is, um— one time I bought something from a website and I didn't know it was, uh, non-returnable. Right? And I got the email after I bought it and it said, oh, no refunds on this product because it was a closeout. And I called the place up and I said, no, I don't want that, cancel the order. They didn't want to cancel the order. I was like, you didn't even do anything with it yet. Yeah, but I said, huh, did you charge back? Yeah, I ended up— yeah, well, I ended up they, they wouldn't cancel the order. They're like, no, we're not canceling it. It's all, all sales are final. And I go, well, there was nothing there. It just came in the email saying all sales are final. I didn't check a box. Yeah, I went back and checked the shopping cart, did it again, sent them a screenshot. They finally refunded my money. They voided it out. That's why I tell people, like, don't do a refund in the same day, just do a void. And when a lot, you know, a lot of times, like, we'll be dealing with a merchant that's from, like, on, on using Stripe right? And they'll say, oh, I got all this fraud, and then I couldn't do anything because, you know, when they do it— when you process a transaction through Stripe, it's, it's authorized and settled at the same time. So they don't have a void button. So you have to go back, you have to refund all those cards. So like, we had somebody recently that we were working with, and I was like, what's all these refunds? I said, oh, we had some— somebody came in and made like 30 orders. We saw it's like all fraudulent addresses, you know, fake credit cards. We called a couple of the phone numbers, no good. And then there's no way to void it, so we had to refund all these cards. And then they still got chargebacks because it was stolen credit cards. And that, that part doesn't make sense to me. So, you know, then they had to contact Stripe, and then they got shut off at Stripe for And he's like, we did what we were supposed to do. They told Stripe we refunded all these cards. Yeah. And you're punishing us because the people did a chargeback? You could see that we did a refund the same, pretty much the same day.

Yup, yup. And they're just talking to a brick wall there, so good luck. Yeah, but that's the difference.

Like, if those orders came in and you were using, you know, regular gateway, you could just go in and hit void, void, void, void, void, and void them all out. And they didn't— they didn't even happen.

That kind of leads me to my next question. So do you think, uh, businesses, uh, should be more towards a traditional merchant account, like, and get away from the, you know, like the, the big three, I like to call them, like PayPal, Square, and Stripe, you know, like, because they're a huge machine, right?

And they're not really—

they don't care. You get a couple of chargebacks, you're done, right? Like, and that's a wrap. So what kind of— what advice do you have for, for businesses starting out, you know?

Yeah, I mean, I think we all know those companies are great until they're not, and then they're really not great, right? So, yeah, um, whenever you have an issue, I think it's a lot better to have, you know, a phone number you can call, you know, someone's gonna answer, you know, have a support rep, whatever. I personally think that peace of mind is worth more than, you know, whatever transaction fee difference may be. Um, and yeah, exactly, they swayed most merchants to look at traditional merchant accounts, you know, and, and figure out like, um, what that support system looks like. Because ultimately, you know, processing payments is your business, right?

And if they don't even know, right, like they don't even know how shitty they have the end of the stick because they're just so used to using these the big guys and not realizing all the other benefits that actually come with a traditional merchant account. 100%.

Yeah. And I think not only can a traditional merchant account help processing payments, but I think it's really a relationship with the business owner where you can help provide suggestions in other areas of their business. Like Stripe is never going to tell you to change your transaction monitoring so that you can catch more fraud like that. That's just not going to happen. Right? Right. If you're working with, you know, like you mentioned, a traditional merchant account provider, then I think they're really going to be able to almost consult with you, you know, and they have data on hundreds, if not thousands of other businesses where they're able to kind of help you run your business more effectively. It's not just processing payments. It's really like a relationship, I think, which you are never going to get with, uh, with the big guys.

No. Yeah, because if you have a chargeback, if we see all of a sudden somebody getting a bunch of chargebacks, you know, we can't— we contact them. I mean, Mark's helped a couple of our merchants already, you know, to, to get the chargeback numbers down and the RDR because they were dealing with these small $20, $30 chargebacks, and it's not worth it for them to Sure, they want to fight them, but in the long run, you have to kind of weigh it out. Like, right, you have to weigh out, like, okay, I need to be at 0.5, and is it worth it? Is it better just to lose 4 or 5 chargebacks? And I think also the scammers kind of figure out, like, especially the large businesses, they go, oh, well, these people are just probably have RDR set up on all this, on all these smaller transactions, so we're just gonna you know, we're just gonna friendly fraud scam them and do a retrieval request or a chargeback and then get our money back through RDR. And I mean, that's kind of sad that the, that the public probably, you know, scammy public people. But I think the card issuers also should hold people's feet to the fire. Like, oh, if you got somebody in there literally like doing a ton of chargebacks I think the card issuers should cancel their card. That's my personal opinion. I think that the— you know, we hear all these complaints about Visa and MasterCard, but no one really looks at the card issuing side, says, hey, you know, why are these people always doing a chargeback? The same, the same offenders. I mean, they got mad at one, uh, one of the gateways that's not around anymore, got bought out, but they used to have a list of like that. They had a blacklist of people after they did like 3 to 5 chargebacks. They got put on the crap list. And no matter if you use that gateway— they don't do that no more. No, because they got in trouble from— for doing that. They said they were blacklisting people and somebody found out about it, you know, the public found out. Yeah. And they, and they kind of got— they kind of got slapped around. But I think they got bought by another company. But, you know, things like that. Or, you know, like in Card Present, we're seeing like the most chargebacks ever, like in retail and restaurant.

And, you know, that's crazy to me. Like the, the some— when I'm hearing him talk sometimes, dude, like he's got— and there's, you know, we deal with a lot of, uh, adult entertainment nightclubs, and these guys go in there, bro. You should— I'm sure you've heard some of the stories, right? Like They're like, but I didn't get what I ordered, bro. You know damn well you got the lap dance. You just weren't happy with the lap dance, and now you're sick because your wife's seeing a charge for $5K, and you're trying to, you're trying to, you know, rob the, the, uh, the establishment, right?

Well, they'll do it for food and drink too.

Yeah, yeah, I'm just saying, I'm trying to make it a little bit more interesting, but yeah.

Adult clubs have it, or even like nightclubs with bottle service. They'll be like, oh, I wasn't there. Well, you had to put your chip in the machine. We had one guy, he insisted that they rubbed the machine on his wallet, right? And that's how they— his Apple Pay. I'm like, Apple Pay doesn't work like that. You have to put it in code or your face up to the phone. Yeah, so there's no way to get your Apple Pay off of your phone without you, you know, Face ID or putting your code in.

Well, you're in Texas, man. I mean, it's— I'm sure you have a lot of, you know, adult clubs down there. So I'm sure you— are you— are you— do you help those types of businesses?

We do like consulting and stuff, but we focus on card not present as chargeback issues are a lot easier to solve there, to be honest. Like, you know, with the card presence stuff again, like you're fighting, like you're fighting against those like pathological liars that, right, it's fair, it's pretty hard, you know. And you can always like take pictures of their ID and like implement all these procedures, but as a software company, it's hard for us to just like help businesses there, you know. Um, there's obviously like some things you can do if it does turn into a chargeback to just increase the odds of winning it back and Obviously that card-present stuff is typically easier to win back because I think the banks can see like, yeah, you were here, you used your chip, you know, like this probably is not fraudulent. Product unacceptable. That's a, that's a bit harder to prove in an adult nightclub. But yeah, I mean, we do focus more so on the card-not-present stuff.

We just, we have like for the card-present, we help the merchants because they typically when they write the letter, they put too much. Personal information in there, like, oh, the guy was here, the guy said this, the guy said that. Yeah, they don't want to hear that. We just kind of give them an explanation. Like, if they say, um, product not received, we go, well, this is a bar restaurant. Typically you walk in, you order, you get served, we present you with the bill, and then you pay it. So why would you pay your bill if you didn't get served, right? And we do the same thing in restaurants. Well, if people— they'll eat in a restaurant. We had one the other day, $2,000 $2,000 of food and drink. Oh, I was— yeah, we didn't, we didn't like the food. American Express like called me on the phone and they're like, well, our mutual customer. I go, no, that's not our mutual customer. I said, we want our money. The per— they had dinner, they had dinner and drinks, they were there, they paid afterwards. Well, can we work something out? And I was like, no, we're not working anything out. We want our $2,000. Yeah, you know, I'm talking to them on behalf of the client, you know, and I'm like, no, the— we served the customer, they had dinner, they didn't make a complaint, blah blah blah blah blah. But, you know, you know, crazy things is I, I see, uh, guys who have won a chargeback, they'll write— they'll take the, the merchant receipt and they'll take a pen and write all the— like, make circles on it. Like, in like the signature but big all over the check. And then when you send that in, the— not all credit cards, sometimes they'll say, oh, it's illegible, we can't read the— we can't read the check because the person scratched through a bunch of stuff. And, you know, so there's just— there's plenty of scammers out there, card present, card not present, you know. So let me ask you another question. This is a thing that comes up all the time. So we had a guy come to us with a gym, right? And he's like trying to explain to me, oh yeah, I need 3D Secure because it's going to prevent this from happening. And I'm trying to explain to him, I go, you can sign somebody up for a 12-month membership. But after, let's say Justin goes to the gym for 5 months, I don't like it. He doesn't like the gym and he wants to quit. He quits and he tells you, stop charging his card. You say, yo, you're in a contract, but you keep charging his card. Justin keeps doing a chargeback and he wins, and he says, I'm not going to this gym anymore. They don't— I try to explain to the gym owner, they don't care that Justin signed a 12-month contract. If you didn't provide a service, the cardholder is going to win.

If you don't have that, if your paperwork is—

no, even if it's signed, they can't keep charging you. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Illegal thing. They could take you to court, but they can't keep charging your card.

What were you saying? There's one program that Visa rolled out, and Mastercard's doing something similar. It's called, um, compelling evidence, which is essentially where if a cardholder has been purchasing— like, let's just say it's a membership— for, um, 120 days or more, um, then essentially they'll kind of reject a fraudulent chargeback. Because it's not fraudulent. They could say subscription canceled for sure. They could say product not received or product unacceptable. Totally valid. That still goes through. But if it's fraudulent, then Visa is kind of saying like, we're putting a hard stop there. Like, you can't just purchase for a year and then charge back everything as fraud and expect that to go through because that's— oh no, it's not fraudulent by the business. So it seems like the card brands are taking a bit more steps to prevent that kind of action from occurring. But I thought that was interesting and maybe something to—

Yeah, it is interesting, the compelling evidence part. It just, it just like, that's just not going to stop with memberships. People can cancel the membership. Visa doesn't care that you signed a 12-month agreement, right? And that's why like a lot of companies will try to get you to pay for a whole year, but also that can backfire on you too because If somebody says 6 months in, well, I don't want to use this anymore, give me a partial refund, and you don't do it, you, you, the business owner can lose the whole entire amount.

That's what I was gonna say.

Right? Yeah, yeah.

And there's no way to stop that, which I explained to merchants. That's the— I tell them, do monthly or quarterly, you know. But a lot of merchants are trying to like get money, like, oh, it's $100 a month, but we'll give it to you for, you know, $1,100, and you get a month free so that, you know, and you paid for the whole year. But I tell myself, somebody doesn't like it and they ask you for a refund and you say no refund, they're just going to write— and especially like Amex or Citibank, Chase, some of the bigger banks are going to side with the customer. Not only are they going to— they're not just going to give them back half the money, they'll give back the entire transaction, right? There's no way to prevent that. Yeah, 100%.

I mean, it's just really ultimately like knowing how to respond to chargebacks, which is easier said than done. And like you mentioned, I mean, in many cases, especially with like the Amexes of the world, you know, the business is certainly at a disadvantage there. So yeah, I mean, it's hard to balance, you know, to weigh that out versus like, oh, you know, better cash flow with the pay up front. Versus like the potential liability of like that entire whole year. So yeah, it's certainly tough for businesses, but even 3D Secure and things like that seem to be really not as good as they used to be because obviously, you know, with 3D Secure, the bank would take liability, but right, businesses kind of abuse that system. So in the US, it seems that that's kind of going away for a lot of, uh, a lot of merchants. So yeah, I don't, I don't really think 3DS has the, the, the future that it seemed it did, unfortunately.

Have you, have you looked at that service or heard of it called Pays? P-A-Z-E. You know, what do you think? I think that's like, I think that should be implemented like everywhere.

Pays as in like P-A-A-Y, or is it—

no, no, P-A-Z-E. It's a product from, uh, the company Early Warning that did Zelle. So basically it works— it would work on any website similar to the way Shopify kind of makes you register and then they send you a text message and you got to put in the code to, you know, two-factor authenticate yourself. Although I don't— I've talked to some Shopify merchants who've told me they've gotten boatloads of chargebacks even though that's been done because people have cloned people's phones or claimed that their phone was cloned. And, um, so that it would send a text to me and then, you know, then the bank would, you know, be on the hook because the, you know, I authenticated myself as a card user. Yeah. You know, super interesting.

Um, I mean, it'll be interesting to see, um, if banks continue to take liability for that. From what I've been hearing, less and less banks are willing to take liability, right? Because ultimately it is their decision, and a lot of banks burned, um, for sure from 3DS. So yeah, we'll see how that goes. Um, in some regions it's still doing really well. Like, um, you know, if you're selling outside of the US, a lot of banks are still taking liability there, and there's obviously more risk selling outside the US too. But, um, that's interesting with Paysa. I, I would definitely look into that. Yeah, check it out.

It's a pretty cool service. Like, paying outside the US, I know like Stripe does a good job with that, but there are other companies that offer the alternative payment methods outside the US. And I always tell merchants, like, if you're doing enough— if you want to really do business outside the US, you should be using these alternative payment methods because they're much harder to charge back because they're ultimately paying in the local currency through a local processor, even though it doesn't really look like that from the, you know, the view of the merchant. That's really what's happening. So if you're getting customers from Brazil, if you use an alternative payment method company— we work with, with one— then they pay with their wallet essentially, because those companies, those countries more operate with wallets. And then it's much harder for them to do a chargeback. Yeah, yeah.

It's really interesting how every country kind of has their own way of paying for, for goods and services. And I think there's a lot of, you know, room for merchants to expand internationally. And, um, you know, it's, it's great that there's services like Stripe and also traditional merchant providers that can kind of help assist merchants as they, they expand internationally. Some countries have way less risk for fraud, um, you know, because American consumers are the worst, um, you know. So yeah, there's definitely like, um, I think a lot of potential outside the US that not many merchants think about.

Yeah, there's a big risk if you're getting a credit card from someone in Brazil and you're processing a non-card present. If they do a chargeback or they don't pay their bank, you're going to get a chargeback and then you have no chargeback rights because it's outside of the U.S. If you're using an alternative payment method, the only problem with alternative payment method is, is that, you know, those companies want you to be doing some volume, like at least $50,000 to $100,000 a month outside of the U.S., and then it actually makes sense. But merchants really do need to understand. We had a merchant recently that did a transaction outside the U.S., and then the person almost burned them. They were— they waited like a few days. They have like a policy, they wait 7 days before they ship the parts. Was motorcycle parts, and the chargeback came in on day 5. Fraud. So they, you know, they, they just let the chargeback go through, and they, and they never shipped the goods. Yep. And, you know, That's the, that's the danger when you're doing business outside the U.S. because yeah, there's, there's, you, you can't fight the chargeback. If you shipped it, if they had shipped it down there, that product would be gone and the money be gone, lost. Yeah, it's a big loss. So you got to really be careful.

Before we let you go, man, you know, I mean, we've been chopping it up here for like 45 minutes already. We don't want to hold you. We could talk about chargebacks all day, right? I know how this guy's long-winded, man. He'll just keep going and going and going. So yeah, man, where can people find you? How can they, you know, get in touch with Disputifier? Where can they go? What social channels? All that good stuff.

Yeah, totally. Feel free to check out my LinkedIn. It's just Mark Wagner and our website is disputifier.com. Most people can't spell that. It's okay. But if you go to my LinkedIn,, you'll, uh, you'll see it in my profile.

Cool, man. We'll definitely, uh, I'll— we'll put that in the, you know, in the credits.

Yeah, we work with Mark, so if you want help with that, we can hook you up with this.

Yeah, hit up Al— Allen— or, you know, myself if you need anything, man. It was really good meeting you, man. I look, uh, uh, you know, you look like a young man, you know what I'm saying? That's good for you, bro, you know what I mean? You're doing well for yourself, so Round of applause for Mark and Disputifier, man.

It's a great service. I mean, yeah, we have a couple clients using it. They love it. Nice. Yeah, thank you.

Amazing.

Well, thanks for being on the podcast, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Great chatting with you guys. Absolutely.

All right, you have a good rest of your day, man, and you take care.

You as well. See ya. All right, peace out.