Table of Contents
Refund Rules
February 20th, 2025
What is a refund rule?
There are two kinds of refund rules:
- Issuer Alert refund rules - these automate refunds for Ethoca & CDRN alerts. These alerts are sent directly from the consumers bank & are guaranteed to turn into chargebacks.
- Early fraud warning refund rules - these automate refunds for EFWs (also known as SAFE or TC40 reports). These alerts are non-billable and the datasource is Stripe itself. These alerts only have a 60% chance of turning into a chargeback.
Refund Rule Criteria
The following criteria can be used to set up your refund rules:
| Attribute | Description | Values | Availability |
| card.brand | The card network or brand of the card, for example mastercard. | amex, diners, discover, interac, jcb, mastercard, unionpay, visa, unknown | EFW, Issuer |
| transaction.amount | The amount of the transaction, converted to USD | 19.99 | EFW, Issuer, RDR |
| transaction.risk_score | The risk score (if applicable), from 1-100. Only available if RFFT is enabled for Stripe merchants | 65 | EFW, Issuer |
| alert.count_on_card | The number of chargeback alerts created on this card for your account. | 4 | Issuer |
| alert.type | Whether the alert was for as fraud or not | Fraud / Friendly Fraud | Issuer |
| alert.skips_vfmp | Whether the issuer logs fraud disputes onto VFMP. If the alert skips vfmp it won't count towards Visa fraud ratios. | true, false | Issuer |
| transaction.is_3ds | Whether the transaction was 3DS | true, false | Issuer |
| transaction.date | The date of the transaction | 8/18/2024 | RDR |
| dispute.type | The type of dispute attempted to be opened. | fraudulent, subscription_cancelled | RDR |
| transaction.currency | The currency of the transaction | usd, cad | RDR |
Automated Ethoca/CDRN refunds
Not every alert from the issuer banks are able to be matched with 100% confidence to a single transaction. As a result, our refund rules will only apply to alerts that are guaranteed to match to a transaction. Undecipherable alerts will not pass through your ruleset and will need to be manually addressed.
Consider refunding every issuer alert
Given Ethoca/CDRN alerts are guaranteed to become chargebacks, a reasonable ruleset is refunding every Ethoca/CDRN alert, and refunding every EFW <$60.
For the full benefit of authorization rate improvements, we'd strongly recommend refunding all issuer based alerts under $100. Merchant's doing so will experience a meaningful lift in approval rates, as issuers do not pay dispute fees for accepting your volume.
What is an Early Fraud Warning?
An Early Fraud Warning, also known as a TC40 report, occurs when a consumer reports their credit card as lost or stolen. Normally, these EFWs are issued prior to the transaction turning becoming a chargeback.
Unlike the other alerts produced by Chargeblast, EFWs are not guaranteed to turn into chargebacks. In addition, not all chargebacks have EFWs attached. Based on our merchant data, roughly 30% of chargebacks have EFWs attached, and roughly 40% of EFWs turn into chargebacks.
For Stripe merchants, you can use Chargeblast's EFW refund rules to selectively automatically issue refunds on for EFW transactions.
You do not want to refund every EFW
Since not all EFWs turn into chargebacks, you do not want to just refund every EFW. Instead, you should selectively refund EFWs. We recommend using them as a fallback for credit card schemes that you do not have good coverage on.
RDR Rules
Unlike the issuer rules, where the transaction is refunded by you, RDR rules are deployed by Visa directly and actioned by the acquiring bank. These rules must be generated via a support ticket with us.
