Chargebacks. You’re cringing just reading that word.
Chargebacks can result from fraud or some sort of miscommunication or misunderstanding by customers.
Whatever the cause of a chargeback, it’s a hassle and loses money.
While you may not be able to prevent all chargebacks, you can take preventive steps to reduce the quantity of chargebacks you have to process.
Identify trends in your chargebacks. Once you’ve identified the most common causes of chargebacks, assess what changes you can make to reduce these root causes.
As events get better at stopping fraud, fraudsters get more sophisticated. Stay up-to-date with trends in fraud and adapt to stay ahead of the industry.
Your staff should know what red flags to look for in orders and what to do if they see them. Keep your staff current with that information for your event and how fraud is changing.
Actively review incoming orders, especially large ones. Reach out to customers with questionable orders to confirm the purchase before processing it.
Ensure that your seat map and general admission sales numbers are automatically reflected on your order form. You can’t sell the same seat twice, and you can’t sell more than your venue’s capacity. Stride Events’s ticketing platform automatically keeps these sales updated.
Once you’ve sold tickets, confirm the order and send the tickets quickly. Quickly filling the order helps prevent customers from creating a chargeback because they didn’t get what they paid for. Stride Events’s ticketing software confirms and sends tickets once an order has been placed online.
Make it easy for customers to find your billing practices and refund policies. This information should be written so it is easy to understand. Making this information clear from the beginning makes it more likely that customers will use your refund process and communicate with you about their order instead of their bank or credit card company.
The next piece of clear communication is sending reminders and updates about your event. These communications will help keep your event top-of-mind and get your attendees excited about it. It also helps ensure people remember they bought tickets, so they don’t question that charge on their card.
Ensuring you have people available to answer billing questions and refunds will make it more likely that customers will work with you rather than issuing a chargeback from their card.
Include your refund policy in your terms and conditions. When customers make a purchase, ask them to agree to them. Stride Events makes it easy to add your terms and conditions to the online purchase pathway.
Use several factors to verify online payments, including a billing address and CVV codes. Stride Events requires CVV codes and billing addresses to verify cards and purchases from all of its ticketing pages.
You know the email and card number of people who aren’t buying your tickets in good faith. Put it to use to stop making sales to them.
Using the Stride Events “Block” feature, you can stop selling tickets to the repeat offenders. The Block feature uses multiple identity markers to stop blocked buyers from making a purchase online.
You’ll be able to focus your ticket sales on attendees, forecast your event’s finances better, and save yourself a headache.
Edited for clarity.
Today, we're going to talk about our new block feature. This feature lets you block scalpers, chargebacks, and disruptive attendees.
Start by logging into your account. This is a demo account, and we've got a demo fake Renaissance Fair here to show you how it works. So, you're going to start by navigating from the sidebar menu to “Financial,” “View Financials.”
And then, you will click the button that says”View Blocks and Invoices.” And, when you click that button you can see “Unpaid Invoices,” “All Invoices,” and “All Blocks.”
We're going to start on the all blocks page so you can see that we already have one email that was blocked by me and then you can see the other purchases blocked.
So, to add an email you just enter it in this field at the bottom. Maybe this is from a past event, and you just want to get ahead and prevent them from purchasing from you this year you'll hit continue, and then you'll save. You may see a different popup if you have more than one event with us. You may see a popup that says block across all events and that popup will also say that you be more specific if you only want it to be on certain events.
So now, you're going to say save because we do want that person blocked. We're going to refresh the page, go back to that view, and now we see that we have two emails blocked.
If I wanted to mass unblock those emails I could click here. If I wanted to be a little bit more specific, I can click on the number, and then I can see everyone separated. So, if I wanted to unblock this one for example I could unblock it here. I can also see how many purchases from this account were blocked and when that account was blocked.
One important thing to note is that while our software starts with email it uses multiple digital identity markers to block people, so it's not just as simple as the email. We're obviously not going to go into too much detail on those multiple identity factors because we want to make sure this feature is working really well for you. But, do know that we look at multiple things, not just the email when you block someone.
The Tucson Rodeo had a lot of success using this feature and they gave us permission to share that success with you so I'm going to navigate to their page now. You’ll notice that they are using our Rodeo Ticket brand, but it's the same software that you just saw.
You can see here that Rachelle, the account manager, has blocked 14 emails which resulted in 61 purchases blocked, which is really great. That's a lot of chargebacks not to have to deal with, so that's awesome. There is another way to block people. You can go to any of the invoices pages. We’ll look at this one. You'll see next to this chargeback a button with the option to block, so you can do that as they come in. That's the tool.
You probably don't want to block every chargeback that comes across your plate. There could be a situation where the husband buys tickets to your event, doesn't tell the wife. And the wife sees the charge on the credit card and is like we didn't do this and issues a chargeback. So, there are some like unintentional chargebacks that are issued like that.
This is a really helpful tool so you can get the most egregious chargeback people blocked and you can get scalpers blocked. And then, if someone was super disruptive you can stop them from coming to future events.
Thanks for tuning in! Have a great day!