The 2021 Chargeback Field Report Examines Covid-19 Impact & Other Challenges for Merchants
Chargebacks911, the global leader in end-to-end chargeback management, was highlighted in a new piece published by the British Retail Consortium.
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) is a leading trade organization for retailers operating in the UK and European markets. The BRC’s membership comprises over 5,000 businesses delivering £180bn of retail sales and employing over one and half million employees.
The piece takes a closer look at some of the most interesting and revealing stats and figures from our recently published 2021 Chargeback Field Report. While the report shows that Covid-19 has had a significant impact on retail merchants, many of the trends observed were already underway years before the pandemic. This includes a surge in friendly fraud chargebacks that we’ve tracked for the better part of a decade.
“The impact of friendly fraud is hard to overestimate, and the threat is outpacing retailers’ ability to deal with it,” the piece notes. “90% of merchants said that ‘cardholder abuse of the chargeback process’ was a leading concern for their business. At the same time, less than one-third described their current efforts at managing friendly fraud as ‘effective.’”
Merchants have several options at their disposal for dealing with this problem. Some options include anti-fraud tools, chargeback alerts, and network inquiries. There is also representment; a practice with which merchants are currently finding little success. By improving processes, they may recapture significant amounts of revenue.
