We are going to be rolling out a new service that offers PayPal chargeback protection. Simply put, we take your buy button, we can either encrypt it or not but the transaction is simply redirected to preCharge. We simply validate the users information without any registration or instructiveness and redirect them to PayPal. If you receive a chargeback while using the service, we will collect on it.

In our research, there doesn't appear to be anything on it and we got the go ahead from there side so it will be good to go.

Any suggestions, thoughts or comments on such a program?

P.S. it will be free for the first 20 transactions a month.

Please provide as much honest and constructive feedback as possible, good is great but constructive is manageable

My honest response is let me know when you offer this service because I'LL BE SIGNING UP!!! I currently run a few stores, and have had a good share of chargebacks in my time, (actually have two pending right now), so I'll be a happy customer.

Do you have a website with more information or need beta testers? I'd be happy to help.

This sounds like an awesome idea. I know I'd use it!

Not sure if this would go well with Paypal. Basically, what you are offering is a layer of protection over Paypal.

v

If you are simply performing some kind of evaluation of the customer, prior to having them pay the merchant via PayPal, and are not using the PayPal system for that evaluation, then it probably wouldn't even be subject to the PayPal User Agreement. However, if you are collecting payments on behalf of the merchant (and the buyer pays directly to your account), you might be violating the Acceptable Use Policy within the User Agreement. You should be sure you have fully and accurately explained the way your service will work when asking PayPal about it, to ensure you are not putting yourself or the merchants who use your service at any risk of violating the policy.

Now, assuming that you are just offering some service that does not interact with the PayPal system, does not involve having the customer pay you instead of the merchant, and just does some evaluation based on your own proprietary means, there would still be some issues that might be of concern to merchants:

- The merchants might need to update their privacy policies to indicate that they are sharing a buyer's information with you
- If the buyer sees any page on your site, they might wonder why they have been redirected to a different site between the merchant's site and the PayPal page
- If your service requires information to be collected from the buyer prior to payment, the buyer might become confused if the same information is collected again at PayPal. For example, if you validate the user's name and street address, but then the customer has to fill it in again at PayPal, it would be confusing why they had to enter it twice. This can be alleviated to some extent by pre-filling any fields that PayPal supports (such as name, email, and shipping address) so that the buyer doesn't have to type them in again. However, if you collect information that is NOT supported in the PayPal form, the buyer might become confused about why the info was collected and whether that information has been lost.
- Even if you are reimbursing the merchants for chargebacks that they receive, the merchant's account can still be impacted if they receive too many chargebacks and/or think that it's unnecessary to respond to disputes received in the Resolution Center of their PayPal account.

Please note, this is just my first thoughts based on your brief description of the service, and I cannot give you a definitive answer as to whether this service complies with PayPal's terms and conditions. Merchants who use Website Payments Pro are subject to additional agreements, and the PayPal User Agreement is also different for merchants in other countries. Any merchant wanting to use your service would need to verify that their usage and any sharing of buyer information is in compliance with whatever PayPal usage agreement(s) they have accepted.

Thanks everyone for the great feedback. We will be rolling out the beta phase this week and I will let all of you know.

Not to be the one that offers negative feedback, but I wouldn't use an unknown service by an unknown company to pass all the details of my customers transactions through their servers for "validation" or whatever you call it.

How do I know you're legit? How do you keep your servers secured? Do you store any sensetive information? What will you do with the information you have access to? Will you spam my customers?

These are just a few objections I can see... and those are just the ones I personally had in 5 seconds after reading your post.

Not that it's not a great idea - but you're going to have to do a LOT to convince potential customers you're legit and will take their customer's information and security very seriously.

Being bonded, insured and getting recognized by PayPal wouldn't hurt. It would also be a good idea to go through some business feedback systems like BBB and BizRate to start building some credibility.

Best of luck with your new service!

belsey,

I am with you. I appreciate positive feedback but negative feedback you can work with so thank you.

Regarding your question, in the payments industry that is always an issue. As you can imagine, everyone is concerned with who is touching their payment data and there are very few exceptions.

I would agree, an unknown company would be a concern but fortunately, that is not the case here. Our company has been in business since 2003 and has serviced thousands of merchants all over the world. In addition, unlike so many payment services out there, our company is PCI Level 1 approved by Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover.

To be a Level 1 Certified Merchant Servicer as you can imagine is not an easy task and is something than less than 100 companies in the United States are actually approved for. It requires intense security, full background checks on the business and the principals in addition to several security and financial audits.

Again, I appreciate everyone's feedback.

I understand that (as I'm sure a lot of people here at SitePoint do too) but you need to express that in an easy understandable way to your customers, who won't be as knowledgeable about the credit card processing industry. "Level 1 Certified" doesn't mean much to someone who has no clue what it means.

Definitely let us know when your service launches! I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Good point beley

How is this:

Visa Certified
MasterCard Certified
American Express Certified
Discover Certified

Will even provide a link to their press release about our certification.

All kidding aside, that is a valid point and I guess we will have to see how the space takes it.

Will let everyone know about the beta launch.

Thanks All.

I think showing those titles as well as their respective logos (if you are allowed) will do a lot for your credibility.

I agree beley. Yes, we do represent to our visitors our accreditation which can be verified through the major associations. Looking forward to a successful beta launch

Thanks again all.

My question at this point is, what company do you represent? Or is that going to be hush until launch?

Fahd

It's not hush, hush, a while back, I didn't mind mentioning names, it's just people are more and more sensitive about anything spam so I tend not to promote a url all over the place. Also, the purpose here was to obtain real feedbacks.

Feel free to check my profile for a site name.

Thanks all.