Chargebacks arise from a number of different sources but one of the most common is consumer confusion. The general formulation is a consumer sees a charge in their banking app, doesn’t recognize it, and contacts their issuing bank to dispute the charge. This is one of the most frequent varieties of friendly fraud. Preventing these sorts of chargebacks can be a complicated endeavor for any merchant, but Ethoca offers a powerful, new tool: Consumer Clarity™, a revamped version of the award-winning Ethoca Eliminator.
Consumer confusion is on the rise. According to figures cited in Ethoca’s press release, 77% of consumers report often finding unrecognizable transactions in their online statements. In the same survey, 96% of consumers said that they would like to have more detailed transaction information available in their digital banking applications. Consumer Clarity™ helps to meet that desire and reduce incidences of consumer confusion, to the benefit of both consumers and merchants.
Consumer Clarity™ provides rich merchant and purchase information, including easy-to-recognize merchant names, purchase location details, and itemized digital receipts. It also provides merchant logos—an important upgrade over Eliminator. Consumer Clarity™ helps facilitate the exchange of this information between cardholders, merchants, financial institutions, and customer service centers. By making sure all parties have access to this information, it gives all parties a greater understanding of transactions and limits the likelihood of confusion-related chargebacks. This information is delivered on-demand via secure information channels, a necessity in an era where personal data is increasingly regulated by governments and sought after by unsavory parties.
Consumer Clarity™ also provides merchants ways to optimize their digital offerings, including new channels for consumer connections. Its integration with consumers’ digital banking applications gives merchants opportunities to increase their brand presence. And by leveraging the scale of MasterCard’s global payment network, it allows for the facilitation of better exchanges of transaction information between merchants and consumers worldwide.
The Consumer Clarity™ page on the Ethoca website offers four general ways that the tool helps merchants:
Reducing costs by eliminating chargebacks caused by friendly fraud
Increasing brand presence by further engaging customers with brand marks
Improving experience by facilitating direct communication with customers when disputes arise
Increasing revenue by preventing lost sales due to friendly fraud and false declines
The crux of its value is its usefulness in resolving disputes and averting chargebacks. A generalized walkthrough of how this usually works is as follows:
The cardholder reviews recent transactions in their digital banking application
Ethoca retrieves enriched transaction details, such as merchant logos and clean merchant names, in order to present it to the cardholder. This may be sufficient to remind the cardholder of the transaction and prevent a dispute
Should the cardholder still not recognize the transaction, thinking it may be fraud, they have the option to click to view a digital receipt
This digital receipt should provide enough additional purchase information and merchant details to confirm the transaction’s legitimacy and prevent an unnecessary dispute
From its introduction in 2018, Ethoca Eliminator proved to be a useful dispute-prevention tool for merchants, consumers, and financial institutions alike. Consumer Clarity™ builds on that foundation and offers additional features. As with any other tool, it works best when used in conjunction with the rest of the toolbox. For example, Ethoca is owned by MasterCard and works with MasterCard transactions. If you want to use a similar tool for Visa transactions, you may want to make use of Verifi Order Insight®.
These tools, as well as others, are an essential resource for any solid chargeback prevention plan. But a good plan requires more than just the right tools. It also needs the right data-driven insights to tell you where and when to use them. It requires ways to reliably measure whether your methods are working or not.
MidMetrics provides all of these key attributes—a full suite of our own proprietary chargeback management tools, including Management Dashboards, In-Depth Analytics Tools, and On-Demand Reports; as well as third party services like Ethoca’s alerts; and Verifi's CDRN alerts and RDR. MidMetrics provides a comprehensive platform for fighting chargebacks and defending your merchant accounts, all for one price.
How much would it cost to cobble all these services together from different providers—and how effective would they be? MidMetrics is expertly designed to be easy to use, easy to integrate with your existing systems, and robust enough to provide actionable insights for every merchant's chargeback situation.
Putting together a chargeback prevention strategy that affords sufficient protection can be daunting, as many different issues can lead to chargebacks. Not sure where to begin? We've got answers for you in this helpful guide, Chargeback Prevention: A Recipe for Healthy Merchant Accounts.